Study on the image segmentation for vascular smooth muscle cells cultured on the silicon membrane stretched by pulsatile flow

Quantitatively analyzing the morphological response to tensile stress for Vascular Smooth Muscle Cells (VSMCs) will be helpful to understanding the growth mechanism and pathology of VSMCs. Image segmentation plays a key role in image analysis and it is also the most difficult step in image processing pipeline. For the images of VSMCs cultured on the silicon membrane stretched by pulsatile flow, one method with eight steps based on difference arithmetic operators is proposed. Image enhancing, image graying, halation removing, Canny edge detection, mathematical morphology dilation, edge smoothing, mathematical morphological reconstruction are implemented according to the set sequence.