Abstract:

Neurofilaments are functional protein polymers that are transported along the axonal processes of nerve cells. Studying the movement of neurofilaments is important in applications such as diagnosing neurodegenerative diseases. Traditional methods largely rely on manual labeling of the neurofilaments in fluorescence microscopy images. An automated method for analyzing the motion of neurofilaments based on trackingbydetection is proposed. The axon along which the neurofilaments move is extracted and represented by a parametric curve. Firstly, the axon is decomposed into blocks. Secondly, the blocks containing the moving neurofilaments are determined by graph labeling using Markov Random Field. Finally, the leading and trailing locations of a neurofilament are refined to subpixel accuracy. Experiments on real timelapse fluorescence image sequences of neurofilament movement demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of our proposed method.  

Key words: Markov Random Field (MRF);graph cut;fluorescence microscopy