Automatic Image Segmentation Method for In Vitro Wound Healing Assay Quantitative Analysis

摘要

In vitro wound healing assay is a useful method to assess cell proliferation and migration, in this context quantification of the process is a critical step. Objective: to develop an automatic segmentation method for wound healing image analysis. Methods: sixty sequential images of two liver tumor-derived cell lines were acquired and processed with a region growing-based segmentation algorithm performed in MATLAB. Results: after image processing HepG2 cells presented a low migration rate respect to SkHepl. Although there were visual differences during evaluation of automatic methodology with a manual segmentation carried out under the supervision of an expert, the average differences determined as percentage of wound region (%WR) in image segmentation were just of 0.97% (n=44) for HepG2 and 0.32% (n=16) in SkHepl. Conclusion: this novel approach is a simple alternative to quantify wound healing assay on sequential images.