Improving segmentation of 3D touching cell nuclei using flow tracking on surface meshes

Automatic segmentation of touching cell nuclei in 3D microscopy images is of great importance in bioimage informatics and computational biology. This paper presents a novel method for improving 3D touching cell nuclei segmentation. Given binary touching nuclei by the method in Li et al. (2007), our method herein consists of several steps: surface mesh reconstruction and curvature information estimation; direction field diffusion on surface meshes; flow tracking on surface meshes; and projection of surface mesh segmentation to volumetric images. The method is validated on both synthesised and real 3D touching cell nuclei images, demonstrating its validity and effectiveness.