Segmentation of nucleus and cytoplasm of a single cell in three-dimensional tomogram using optical coherence tomography (vol 22, 036003, 2017)

A random rayburst sampling (RRBS) framework was developed to detect the nucleus and cell membrane boundaries in three-dimensional (3-D) space. Raw images were acquired through a full-field optical coherence tomography system with submicron resolution-i.e., 0.8 mu m in lateral and 0.9 mu m in axial directions. The near-isometric resolution enables 3-D segmentation of a nucleus and cell membrane for determining the volumetric nuclear-to-cytoplasmic (N/C) ratio of a single cell. The RRBS framework was insensitive to the selection of seeds and image pixel noise. The robustness of the RRBS framework was verified through the convergence of the N/C ratio searching algorithm. The relative standard deviation of the N/C ratio between different randomly selected seed sets was only 2%. This technique is useful for various in vitro assays on single-cell analyses. (C) 2017 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE).