Advanced methods of cells segmentation and tracking in color images acquired by optical microscope aimed at characterization of cell motility in time

PhD study program: Applied Mathematics
Akademic year: 2020-2021
Advisor: prof. RNDr.Ing.Ivan Bajla, PhD. (umerbajl@savba.sk)
External educational institution: Institute of Measurement Science SAS
Accepting university: Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Informatics, Comenius University in Bratislava, Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics

Annotation:
Within the development of a new experimental platform for measurement of the biological response of weak low-frequency electromagnetic fields in cells, a topical research subjects arises. They are the optimization and algorithmization of a sequence of convenient digital operations with microscopic yeast cells images. First of all, the mutually coupled problems of input color image decoloring and objects segmentation are to be explored. However, the application of adaptive segmentation methods need not
ensure sufficiently accurate segmentation, due to various types of artefacts, e.g., glued or splitted objects, etc.. Therefore the next open topic of the dissertation concerns the image artefacts elimination by using advanced techniques of digital image processing. The prerequisite for quantitative evaluation of the developed algorithms is the construction of a suitable benchmark basis for computer experiments, including color image phantoms of yeast cells together with background and noise. Consequently a special, up-to-date, research topic of advanced object tracking algorithms of alive cells, which are acquired by a microscope as video sequences, arises. Such an approach enables to describe and quantitatively evaluate kinetics of moving cells. The ultimate goal of the research into a sequence of all operations being described is a proposal of a time function of cell motility. An additional goal of the dissertation consists in investigation of various alternatives of individual operations and performing of their comparative analysis.

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