Extraction of Neurite Structures for High Throughput Imaging Screening of Neuron Based Assays

Neuron image analysis has recently emerged as a critical component for enabling quantitative systems neurobiology and high throughput drug screening. In this paper, we present a new algorithm for fast and automatic extraction of neurite structures in microscopy neuron images. The algorithm is based on novel methods for soma segmentation, seed point detection, recursive center line detection, and 2D curve smoothing. The algorithm is fully automatic without any human interaction while robust enough for processing images of poor quality, e.g., low contrast or low signal-to-noise ratio. It can be used to extract accurately highly complex neurite structures. All these advantages make the proposed algorithm suitable for increasingly demanding and complex image analysis tasks in systems biology and drug screening.