Automatic stereological analysis of biological tissue including section thickness determination

Abstract

Systems and methods are provided for automatic determination of slice thickness of an image stack in a computerized stereology system, as well as automatic quantification of biological objects of interest within an identified slice of the image stack. Top and bottom boundaries of a slice can be identified by applying a thresholded focus function to determine just-out-of-focus focal planes. Objects within an identified slice can be quantified by performing a color processing segmentation followed by a gray-level processing segmentation. The two segmentation processes generate unique identifiers for features in an image that can then be used to produce a count of the features.

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