Title: Morphological analysis of zebrafish embryo tails

Authors: Jianfeng Lu; Tao Wu; Lei Cheng; Zhenwen Zhu; Jingyu Yang

Addresses: School of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing 210094, China. ' School of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing 210094, China. ' School of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing 210094, China. ' School of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing 210094, China. ' School of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing 210094, China

Abstract: Quantitative analysis of image-based phenotype is of significant importance in zebrafish image analysis and high-content screening. In this paper, an automatic analysis pipeline is proposed for quantification of the curvedness of zebrafish embryo tails. First, zebrafish embryos are extracted based on the active contour model, and then its skeleton line is generated by the principal graph algorithm. Several curvedness measures of tail skeleton are designed and compared, and experimental results show that joint consideration of the tail shape and its relative position relationship can result in better performance. The proposed pipeline has comparable performance to the manual analysis.

Keywords: zebrafish embryo tails; tail curvedness; morphological analysis; skeletonisation; image analysis; tail skeleton; zebrafish embryo images; image segmentation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCBDD.2012.045953

International Journal of Computational Biology and Drug Design, 2012 Vol.5 No.1, pp.75 - 88

Published online: 05 Dec 2014 *

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