Extracting the ridge set as a graph for quantification of actin filament images obtained by confocal laser scanning microscopy

摘要

The progress in image acquisition technique provides life sciences with an abundance of data. Image analysis facilitates the assessment. The actin cytoskeleton plays a crucial role in understanding the behavior of osteoblastic cells on biomaterials. It can be visualized by confocal laser scanning microscopy. In these images it appears as a dense network of bright ridges which is so far only qualitatively assessed. For quantification there is a need for ridge detection techniques which provide a geometrical description of this graph-like feature. The state of the art methods do not cope with the systematical degradation of the brightness information. This paper presents the key part of a ridge tracking technique, which makes more efficient use of context information. Two random models confirm the accuracy and highlight the area for further improvement of the method.