Automatic Evaluation of Area-Related Immunogold Particles Density in Transmission Electron Micrographs

Immunogold particles are used in electron microscopy to determine sub-cellular location of biological relevant macromolecules, such as proteins, lipids, carbohydrates, and nucleic acids. In this paper an algorithm is proposed which enables automatic evaluation of the immunogold particles density in transmission electron micrographs. The introduced algorithm combines two different feature localization approaches. Coarse locations of the immunogold particles are recognized by image convolution with a Gaussian prototype and a multi-scale filtering is used to refine the locations. This algorithm was evaluated by using micrographs of human colorectal carcinoma cells. A higher accuracy of the immunogold particles detection was achieved in comparison with a state-of-the-art method. The improved detection accuracy enables a more precise evaluation of the area-related immunogold particles density.