An automated method for cell detection in zebrafish

作者：Liu Tianming; Li Gang; Nie Jingxin; Tarokh Ashley; Zhou Xiaobo; Guo Lei; Malicki Jarema; Xia Weiming; Wong Stephen T C^*

来源：Neuroinformatics, 2008, 6(1): 5-21.

DOI：10.1007/s12021-007-9005-7

• zebrafish
• Alzheimer's disease
• retina development
• image processing
• neuronal cell detection
• modeling

Quantification of cells is a critical step towards the assessment of cell fate in neurological disease or developmental models. Here, we present a novel cell detection method for the automatic quantification of zebrafish neuronal cells, including primary motor neurons, Rohon-Beard neurons, and retinal cells. Our method consists of four steps. First, a diffused gradient vector field is produced. Subsequently, the orientations and magnitude information of diffused gradients are accumulated, and a response image is computed. In the third step, we perform non-maximum suppression on the response image and identify the detection candidates. In the fourth and final step the detected objects are grouped into clusters based on their color information. Using five different datasets depicting zebrafish cells, we show that our method consistently displays high sensitivity and specificity of over 95%. Our results demonstrate the general applicability of this method to different data samples, including nuclear staining, immunohistochemistry, and cell death detection.

• 出版日期2008-3
• 单位西北工业大学