Minimal path techniques for automatic extraction of microglia extension

this paper presents new methods to segment thin tree structures, wich are for example present in microglia extensions and cardiac or neuronal blood vessels. The Fast Marching method allows the segmentation of tree structures from a single point chosen by the user when a priori information is available about the length of tree. However, in general, there is no way to stop the propagation automatically. In our case, no a priori information about the length of the microglia extension is available. We propose here to use Harris points to define a criterion to stop the propagation. The tree structure is defined as the set of minimal paths, relatively to the weighted distance by a cost potential, extracted from a source point (root of the tree) to all Harris points. These points can be used also to track the tree structure in image sequences. Numerical results from synthetic and microscopic images are presented.

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