Automatic detection of cellular necrosis in epithelial cell cultures

Unsupervised segmentation, based on texture analysis, classifies each image region into three groups: live cells, necrotic cells and background. The segmentation is based on three discriminant functions, built using a total of 12 parameters derived from the histogram and the co-occurrence matrix. These parameters were selected performing a discriminant analysis on a training set that included images from three different cultures. Once images are automatically segmented, the approximate number of live and dead cells is obtained by dividing each area by the average size of each cell type.