Area-based cell colony surviving fraction evaluation: A novel fully automatic approach using general-purpose acquisition hardware

Overall flow diagram of the processing pipeline of the proposed fully automatic approach. Four main stages can be identified: (i) image-preprocessing, basically dealing with the RGB to CIE L*u*v* conversion; (ii) multi-well detection, which identifies and selects the wells inside the multi-well plate image, by exploiting Circle Hough Transform; (iii) colony extraction, based on a local adaptive thresholding algorithm, which segments cell colonies from the well background; (iv) Surviving Fraction (SF) evaluation, which measures the SF of the current well according to the treated ACCT against the reference untreated ACCU (control).269