Multiphase level set for automated delineation of membrane-bound macromolecules

Membrane-bound macromolecules play an important role in tissue architecture and cell-cell communication, and is regulated by almost one-third of the genome. At the optical scale, one group of membrane proteins expresses themselves as linear structures along the cell surface boundaries, while others are sequestered. This paper targets the former group, whose intensity distributions are often heterogeneous and may lack specificity. Segmentation of the membrane protein enables the quantitative assessment of localization for comparative analysis. We introduce a three-step process to (i) regularize the membrane signal through iterative tangential voting, (ii) constrain the location of surface proteins by nuclear features, and (iii) assign membrane proteins to individual cells through an application of multi-phase geodesic level-set. We have validated our method against a dataset of 200 images, and demonstrated that multiphase level set has a superior performance compared to gradient vector flow snake.