Efficient phase contrast microscopy restoration applied for muscle myotube detection.

This paper proposes a new image restoration method for phase contrast microscopy as a mean to enhance the quality of images prior to image analysis. Compared to state-of-the-art image restoration algorithms, our method has a more solid theoretical foundation and is orders of magnitude more efficient in computation. We validated the proposed method by applying it to automated muscle myotube detection, a challenging problem that has not been tackled without staining images. Results on 300 phase contrast microscopy images from three different culture conditions demonstrate that the proposed restoration scheme improves myotube detection, and that our approach is far more computationally efficient than previous methods.