Cell-sensitive phase contrast microscopy imaging by multiple exposures

We propose a novel way of imaging live cells in a Petri dish by the phase contrast microscope. By taking multiple exposures of phase contrast microscopy images on the same cell dish, we estimate a cell-sensitive camera response function which responds to cells' irradiance signals but generates a constant on non-cell background signal. The result of this new microscopy imaging is visually superior quality, which reveals the appearance details of cells and suppresses background noise near zero. Using the cell-sensitive microscopy imaging, cells' original irradiance signals are restored from all exposures and the irradiance signals on non-cell background regions are restored as a uniform constant (i.e., the imaging system is sensitive to cells only but insensitive to non-cell background). The restored irradiance signals greatly facilitate the cell segmentation by simple thresholding. The experimental results validate that high quality cell segmentation can be achieved by our approach. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.