Processing and Visualization of Light Microscope Images

The analysis of three-dimensional structures of tissues and cellular constituents is a fundamental task in Biology and Medicine. Although three-dimensional images, acquired by light microscopes, play an important role in such knowledge domains, their analysis has not been much exploited compared to other imaging technologies, such as X-ray radiography, computerized tomography or magnetic resonance. In light microscopy, the majority of the activities involved in the image analysis (for instance, detection, counting, quantification) is still performed manually. The main difficulties among the others include the fact that the objects under investigation usually have complex structures, large number of cellular elements, shape variations and presence of noise in the acquired images. This paper describes a method for processing and visualization of images obtained with light microscopes. An effective transfer function based on the optical density of the cellular constituents is employed to generate the volumetric visualization. Several real data sets are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.