Segmentation of Inter-neurons in Three Dimensional Brain Imagery

Abstract

Segmentation of neural cells in three dimensional fluorescence microscopy images is a challenging image processing problem. In addition to being important to neurobiologists, accurate segmentation is a vital component of an automated image processing system. Due to the complexity of the data, particularly the extreme irregularity in neural cell shape, generic segmentation techniques do not perform well. This paper presents a novel segmentation technique for segmenting neural cells in three dimensional images. Accuracy rates of over 90% are reported on a data set of 100 images containing over 130 neural cells and subsequently validated using a novel data set of 64 neurons.