Automatic detection of mitochondria from electron microscope tomography images: a curve fitting approach

Abstract

Mitochondria are sub-cellular components which are mainly responsible for synthesis of adenosine tri-phosphate (ATP) and involved in the regulation of several cellular activities such as apoptosis. The relation between some common diseases of aging and morphological structure of mitochondria is gaining strength by an increasing number of studies. Electron microscope tomography (EMT) provides high-resolution images of the 3D structure and internal arrangement of mitochondria. Studies that aim to reveal the correlation between mitochondrial structure and its function require the aid of special software tools for manual segmentation of mitochondria from EMT images. Automated detection and segmentation of mitochondria is a challenging problem due to the variety of mitochondrial structures, the presence of noise, artifacts and other sub-cellular structures. Segmentation methods reported in the literature require human interaction to initialize the algorithms. In our previous study, we focused on 2D detection and segmentation of mitochondria using an ellipse detection method. In this study, we propose a new approach for automatic detection of mitochondria from EMT images. First, a preprocessing step was applied in order to reduce the effect of non-mitochondrial sub-cellular structures. Then, a curve fitting approach was presented using a Hessian-based ridge detector to extract membrane-like structures and a curve-growing scheme Finally, an automatic algorithm was employed to detect mitochondria which are represented by a subset of the detected curves. The results show that the proposed method is more robust in detection of mitochondria in consecutive EMT slices as compared with our previous automatic method.