Quantification of Fibers through Automatic Fiber Reconstruction from 3D Fluorescence Confocal Images

Motivation: Fibers as the extracellular filamentous structures determine the shape of the cytoskeletal structures. Their characterization and reconstruction from a 3D cellular image represent very useful quantitative information at the cellular level. In this paper, we presented a novel automatic method to extract fiber diameter distribution through a pipeline to reconstruct fibers from 3D fluorescence confocal images. The pipeline is composed of four steps: segmentation, skeletonization, template fitting and fiber tracking. Segmentation of fiber is achieved by defining an energy based on tensor voting framework. After skeletonizing segmented fibers, we fit a template for each seed point. Then, the fiber tracking step reconstructs fibers by finding the best match of the next fiber segment from the previous template. Thus, we define a fiber as a set of templates, based on which we calculate a diameter distribution of fibers.