Automatic Segmentation of Human Chromosomes

Abstract

This paper is concerned with automatic segmentation of high resolution digitized metaphases. Firstly using a thresholding technique, a binary image of the cell picture is obtained. This binary image contains the addresses of darker pixels of the gray image of the colored cell picture. Several thousand of random points are assigned from among these addresses, and then using a distance condition, typically 50 pixels, and the number of centers is reduced to near 100. These points are search centers for chromosome segmentation.   Algorithm first searches eight pixels surrounding the center. Picks the coordinates of the pixels darker than the gray level 0.9, then passes to one of the pixels recently recorded as dark enough, and repeat the same procedure to the neighbors which are not visited before. If none of the new neighbors are not darker than 0.9, search reaches at the boundaries of the chromosome, and ends. Then we call the pixels of the chromosomes in the colored image from the addresses in the binary counterparts to finish segmentation.