Automatic cell nuclei detection: a protocol to acquire multispectral images and to compare results between color and multispectral images

摘要

High-throughput screening in histology and analysis need a necessary automatic cell or nucleus counting. Current methods and systems based on grayscale or color images give results with counting errors. We suggest to use multispectral imaging (with more than three bands) rather than color one for nucleus counting. A traditional acquisition chains uses a source of white light and a CCD camera in addition to the optical microscope. To pass to a multispectral acquisition, we use a Programmable Light Source (PLS) in the place of the white light source. This PLS is capable of generating different wavelengths in the visible spectrum. So, one color image and four multispectral images have been acquired from histological slices. The four multispectral images contain respectively 3 bands, 5 bands, 7 bands and 10 bands. To make a proper comparison of data, several considerations have been taken, like camera linearity, intensity difference between the wavebands from the PLS and non uniformity of the light intensity range in the images. So, a set of measures were done for calibrating the system. An automatic detection method based on segmentation by expectation-maximization and ellipse fitting is used. An extension of this method is proposed in order to be applied to multispectral images. The original and the extended method are then applied to the data previously acquired to have first results regarding the effect of using multispectral images rather than color ones.