Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine
Volume 2013 (2013), Article ID 381356, 11 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/381356
Research Article

Segmentation and Morphometric Analysis of Cells from Fluorescence Microscopy Images of Cytoskeletons

Yoshihiro Ujihara,1 Masanori Nakamura,2 Hiroshi Miyazaki,3 and Shigeo Wada3

1Department of Physiology, Kawasaki Medical School, 577 Matsushima, Kurashiki, Okayama 701-0192, Japan
2Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Saitama University, Saitama, Saitama 338-8570, Japan
3Graduate School of Engineering Science, Osaka University, Toyonaka, Osaka 560-8531, Japan

Received 12 January 2013; Revised 18 March 2013; Accepted 18 April 2013

Academic Editor: Younghae Do

Copyright © 2013 Yoshihiro Ujihara et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

We developed a method to reconstruct cell geometry from confocal fluorescence microscopy images of the cytoskeleton. In the method, region growing was implemented twice. First, it was applied to the extracellular regions to differentiate them from intracellular noncytoskeletal regions, which both appear black in fluorescence microscopy imagery, and then to cell regions for cell identification. Analysis of morphological parameters revealed significant changes in cell shape associated with cytoskeleton disruption, which offered insight into the mechanical role of the cytoskeleton in maintaining cell shape. The proposed segmentation method is promising for investigations on cell morphological changes with respect to internal cytoskeletal structures.