Morphological analysis of zebrafish embryo tails.

Quantitative analysis of image-based phenotype is of significant importance in zebrafish image analysis and high-content screening. In this paper, an automatic analysis pipeline is proposed for quantification of the curvedness of zebrafish embryo tails. First, zebrafish embryos are extracted based on the active contour model, and then its skeleton line is generated by the principal graph algorithm. Several curvedness measures of tail skeleton are designed and compared, and experimental results show that joint consideration of the tail shape and its relative position relationship can result in better performance. The proposed pipeline has comparable performance to the manual analysis.