Correlation-based Method for Automatic Mitotic Cell Detection in Phase Contrast Microscopy

Abstract

A simple and fast method is presented which detects mitotic cells from two cell lines imaged in two phase-contrast microscopy techniques. Such detection is a first step to more sophisticated image processing tasks like determination of mitotic index or mitotic cell tracking in time-lapse movies. Detection algorithm is based on template matching approach that provides a list of candidates. The list is then pruned by validation algorithm that takes into account a priori information about mitotic cells. The method has been implemented as plugin for ImageJ and has been tested for several different data sets.