Digital phantoms of cell nuclei and the use of simulations in nuclear studies
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| Year of publication | 2010 |
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| Description | Nuclear studies still face the problem of the quality of related image analysis results. Degradations caused by cell preparation, optics and electronics considerably affect most 2D and 3D image data acquired using fluorescence microscopy. That is why image processing algorithms applied to these data typically offer imprecise and unreliable results. As the ground truth (correct result) for given image data is not available in most experiments, the outputs of different image analysis methods can be neither verified nor compared to each other. Estimates of ground truth by experts are very subjective and strongly vary between different experts. In order to overcome these difficulties, we have created a toolbox [1] that can generate 3D digital phantoms of cell nuclei along with their corresponding images degraded by specific optics and electronics. The user can then apply image analysis methods to such simulated image data. The analysis results (such as segmentation or measurement results) can be compared with ground truth derived from input object digital phantoms (or measurements on them). In this way, image analysis methods can be compared to each other and their quality (based on the difference from ground truth) can be computed. |
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