Segmentation of Neural Stem/Progenitor Cells Nuclei within 3-D Neurospheres

Neural stem cells derived from both embryonic and adult brain can be cultured as neurospheres; a free floating 3-D aggregate of cells. Neurospheres represent a heterogenous mix of cells including neural stem and progenitor cells. In order to investigate the self-renewal, growth and differentiation of cells within neurospheres, it is crucial that individual nuclei are accurately identified using image segmentation. Hence effective segmentation algorithm is indispensible for microscopy based neural stem cell studies. In this paper, we present a seed finding approach in scale space to identify the center of nuclei in 3-D. Then we present a novel segmentation approach, called “Evolving Generalized Voronoi Diagram”, which uses the identified centers to segment nuclei in neurospheres. Comparison of our computational results to mannually annotated ground truth demonstrates that the proposed approach is an efficient and accurate segmentation approach for 3-D neurospheres.