Missouri University of Science and Technology, Rolla, MO 65409 USA.
Tsinghua University, China.
Med Image Anal. 2015 Oct;25(1):111-21. doi: 10.1016/j.media.2015.04.011. Epub 2015 Apr 17.
We propose a novel way of imaging live cells in a Petri dish by the phase contrast microscope. By taking multiple exposures of phase contrast microscopy images on the same cell dish, we estimate a cell-sensitive camera response function which responds to cells' irradiance signals but generates a constant on non-cell background signal. The result of this new microscopy imaging is visually superior quality, which reveals the appearance details of cells and suppresses background noise near zero. Using the cell-sensitive microscopy imaging, cells' original irradiance signals are restored from all exposures and the irradiance signals on non-cell background regions are restored as a uniform constant (i.e., the imaging system is sensitive to cells only but insensitive to non-cell background). The restored irradiance signals greatly facilitate the cell segmentation by simple thresholding. The experimental results validate that high quality cell segmentation can be achieved by our approach.
我们提出了一种通过相差显微镜对培养皿中的活细胞进行成像的新方法。通过对同一细胞培养皿上的多个相差显微镜图像进行曝光，我们估计了一个对细胞敏感的相机响应函数，该函数对细胞的辐照度信号做出响应，但在非细胞背景下生成恒定的信号。这种新的显微镜成像的结果具有优越的视觉质量，能够揭示细胞的外观细节，并将背景噪声抑制到接近零。使用细胞敏感显微镜成像，可以从所有曝光中恢复细胞的原始辐照度信号，并将非细胞背景区域的辐照度信号恢复为均匀的常数（即成像系统仅对细胞敏感，而对非细胞背景不敏感）。恢复后的辐照度信号极大地促进了简单阈值分割的细胞分割。实验结果验证了我们的方法可以实现高质量的细胞分割。
