Cell segmentation and NC ratio analysis of third harmonic generation virtual biopsy images based on marker-controlled gradient watershed algorithm

Traditional biopsy procedure requires invasive tissue removal from a living subject followed by time-consuming complicatedly processing, so noninvasive in vivo virtual biopsy is a highly desired technique which own ability to obtain exhaustive tissue images without removing tissues from subjects. Some sets of in vivo virtual biopsy images provided by some healthy volunteers are processed by our cell segmentation approach based on marker-controlled gradient watershed algorithm to isolate the nuclei and cytoplasm and also evaluate their Nuclear-to-Cytoplasmic (NC) ratio. From our experimental results, our algorithm has significant potential for in vivo cell segmentation and NC ratio analysis to identify or detect the early symptoms of some skin diseases with abnormal NC ratios, such as skin cancers in clinical diagnosis.