Semi-automatic segmentation of tissue cells from confocal microscope images

We present a semi-automatic method for extracting the 3D boundary of the cells in a compact tissue cross-section photographed by a confocal microscope. The confocal microscope provides pictures at different depths of the cells which can be considered as the image slices of the tissue section. Segmentation of cell boundary from different image slices and combining them to obtain 3D surface automatically is a difficult task. We have developed an approach where given one segmented image slice, the other image slices can be automatically segmented in a layered approach. The idea is to use the information of the previous segmented image slice for segmenting the current image slice