Cell counting is commonly used to determine proliferation rates in cell cultures and for adherent cells it is often a ‘destructive’ process requiring disruption of the cell monolayer resulting in the inability to follow cell growth longitudinally. This process is time consuming and utilises significant resource. In this study a relatively inexpensive, rapid and widely applicable phase contrast microscopy‐based technique has been developed that emulates the contrast changes taking place when bright field microscope images of epithelial cell cultures are defocused. Processing of the resulting images produces an image that can be segmented using a global threshold; the number of cells is then deduced from the number of segmented regions and these cell counts can be used to generate growth curves. The parameters of this method were tuned using the discrete mereotopological relations between ground truth and processed images. Cell count accuracy was improved using linear discriminant analysis to identify spurious noise regions for removal.

中文翻译：

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具有自动参数选择的相差显微镜图像中的自动无创上皮细胞计数

细胞计数通常用于确定细胞培养和贴壁细胞的增殖率，它通常是一个“破坏性”过程，需要破坏细胞单层，导致无法纵向跟踪细胞生长。这个过程是耗时的并且使用了大量资源。在这项研究中，开发了一种相对便宜、快速且广泛适用的相差显微镜技术，该技术模拟了上皮细胞培养物的明场显微镜图像散焦时发生的对比度变化。对结果图像的处理产生可以使用全局阈值进行分割的图像；然后从分割区域的数量推导出细胞数量，这些细胞计数可用于生成生长曲线。该方法的参数使用地面实况和处理图像之间的离散分体拓扑关系进行调整。使用线性判别分析来识别要去除的虚假噪声区域，从而提高了细胞计数的准确性。