Automatic recognition and separation of touching and overlapping chromosomes

Today, Karyotype analysis is frquently used in cytogenetics. it is time-consuming and repetitive, so an automatic analysis can greatly be valued. In this reasearch, an automatic method is presented. it first uses the geometric shape of the clusters to devide them into single chromosomes and clusters with more than one chromosome. Then each cluster is investigated to find the dark paths in touching chromosomes and geometric shapes to separate overlapping ones. A criterion function decides about similarity between the outputs and the single chromosomes and the best one is chosen. precision of this method in recognition of clusters with more than one chromosome is 75% and in separation of touching and overlapping ones are 74% and 66% respectively.