An adaptively optimized algorithm for counting nuclei in X-ray micro-CT scans of whole organisms

Abstract

Living organisms are primarily made of cells. Identifying them and characterizing their geometry and spatial distribution is a first step towards building multi-scale models of these biomaterials. We propose a method to count cells using nuclei in an X-ray microtomographic scan of a zebrafish. To account for scanning artifacts and partial volume effect, the method is adaptively calibrated using parameters approximated from the manifold of manually selected and optimized special cases. The methodology is tested on nuclei in the eyes of zebrafish larvae of different ages.