Nonparametric joint shape and feature priors for segmentation of dendritic spines

Multimodal shape density estimation is a challenging task in many biomedical image segmentation problems. Existing techniques in the literature estimate the underlying shape distribution by extending Parzen density estimator to the space of shapes. Such density estimates are only expressed in terms of distances between shapes which may not be sufficient for ensuring accurate segmentation when the observed intensities provide very little information about the object boundaries. In such scenarios, employing additional shape-dependent discriminative features as priors and exploiting both shape and feature priors can aid to the segmentation process. In this paper, we propose a segmentation algorithm that uses nonparametric joint shape and feature priors using Parzen density estimator. The joint prior density estimate is expressed in terms of distances between shapes and distances between features. We incorporate the learned joint shape and feature prior distribution into a maximum a posteriori estimation framework for segmentation. The resulting optimization problem is solved using active contours. We present experimental results on dendritic spine segmentation in 2-photon microscopy images which involve a multimodal shape density.