Classification of cell phases in time-lapse images by vector quantization and markov models

Abstract

Advances in fluorescent probing and microscopic imaging technology provide important tools for biology and medicine research in studying the structures and functions of cells and molecules. Such studies require the processing and analysis of huge amounts of image data, and manual image analysis is very time consuming, thus costly, and also potentially inaccurate and poorly reproducible. Stages of an automated cellular imaging analysis consist of segmentation, feature extraction, classification, and tracking of individual cells in a dynamic cellular population. Image classification of cell phases in a fully automatic manner presents the most difficult task of such analysis. We are interested in applying several advanced computational, probabilistic, and fuzzy-set methods for the computerized classification of cell nuclei in different mitotic phases. We tested several proposed computational procedures with real image sequences recorded over a period of twenty-four hours at every fifteen minutes with a time-lapse fluorescence microscopy. The experimental results have shown that the proposed methods are effective and has potential for higher performance with better cellular feature extraction strategy.