Nuclear segmentation in microscope cell images: A hand-segmented dataset and comparison of algorithms

Image segmentation is an essential step in many image analysis pipelines and many algorithms have been proposed to solve this problem. However, they are often evaluated subjectively or based on a small number of examples. To fill this gap, we hand-segmented a set of 97 fluorescence microscopy images (a total of 4009 cells) and objectively evaluated some previously proposed segmentation algorithms. We focus on algorithms appropriate for high-throughput settings, where only minimal user intervention is feasible. The hand-labeled dataset (and all software used to compare methods) is publicly available to enable others to use it as a benchmark for newly proposed algorithms.