How do I isolate certain parts of my image and measure certain quntitative aspects of the same like length, radius, distance, etc?

Hello,

I am still a rookie in image processing and am constantly willing to learn. Now that being said, I needed some guidance on imaging. I have a specific image of neurons, which are indicated in black and the rest the background, whose lengths and number I need to measure. Now instead of doing that manually, which IS possible in this case, since there are a fewer number of them, when I go to images with higher numbers, that would be quite tedious and cumbersome. So therefore, I would like to know and how, there is an easier method to do the same.

Please ignore the black colored dots since they are just artifacts. The remaining black lines are the neurons and I would to like to measure the NUMBER and LENGTH of these from the image. The scale of the length is in micrometers.

Please help me. Thanks in Advance!

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

Start with my Image Processing Tutorial in my FIle Exchange

but you have a very challenging and ambiguous problem. Who's to say what the "right" answer is.

[Guru Charan Das Mudigonda]

Hello,

Thank you so much for the quick response. Yes, I do understand that it is ambiguous. I do not want an exact number but just maybe an approximation. I mean, I am not able to understand the paradigm on about how to start approaching this problem. Yes I will look into your File Exchange. Thank you so much for that. But if you could help me understand on how to begin approaching the problem, like taking a small template of one single neuron, and then correlating it with the entire image maybe, then taking all the pixels around the highly correlated parts and measuring the non zero pixels lengthwise.... or something like that maybe? That's what I had in mind. I do not know whether I am approaching this problem right or wrong. Please help me.

Thanks in Advance!

[Image Analyst]

Sorry - I'm not a neurologist so I don't know what a neuron is or what it looks like or how many are in the image. Could you indicate them, like whether it's the round blobs or the fibers, and point each of them out and number them?

[Guru Charan Das Mudigonda]

Hello,

I am sorry for not clarifying this faster. I am attaching one more image that indicates the specific neurons in red rectangular boxes. They are the fibers and not the blobs. The blobs are the artifacts which do not need to be considered. I have indicated four neurons in this image (I know that there are only three rectangular boxes but the largest box consists of two different neurons which I could not clearly indicate using two separate boxes). Thank you so much for such fast responses. I am sorry for this delay.

Hope you find my indications in the image helpful for understanding my problem!