Detection and Localization of Drosophila Egg Chambers in Microscopy Images

摘要

Drosophila melanogaster is a well-known model organism that can be used for studying oogenesis (egg chamber development) including gene expression patterns. Standard analysis methods require manual segmentation of individual egg chambers, which is a difficult and time-consuming task. We present an image processing pipeline to detect and localize Drosophila egg chambers that consists of the following steps: (i) superpixel-based image segmentation into relevant tissue classes; (ii) detection of egg center candidates using label histograms and ray features; (iii) clustering of center candidates and; (iv) area-based maximum likelihood ellipse model fitting. Our proposal is able to detect 96% of human-expert annotated egg chambers at relevant developmental stages with less than 1% false-positive rate, which is adequate for the further analysis.