Detection of immunogold markers in images obtained from transmission electron microscopy

Abstract

In this paper a method is introduced which enables automatic detection of immunogold markers in transmission electron micrographs. Immunogold markers are used in electron microscopy to determine sub-cellular location of biological relevant macromolecules, such as proteins, lipids, carbohydrates, and nucleic acids. The proposed method combines image segmentation and feature localization approaches to improve accuracy of the immunogold markers detection in low contrast and highly textured image regions. A segmentation algorithm is intended in this study, which applies a flood-fill morphological operation. Accuracy of this method was evaluated by using electron microscopy images of human colorectal carcinoma cells. The experimental results show that the introduced method enables detection of immunogold markers with low false positive and false negative rates