Application Notes
Automatic morphometric extraction of the rabbit osteocytic lacunae using Segment.ai
December 2021
Osteocytes form an intercellular network similar to a neuronal network in bone. Drs. Tadahiro Iimura and Takanori Sato at the Department of Pharmacology, Faculty of Dental Medicine, Hokkaido University, visualize and measure this network structure, the functional significance of which remains to be elucidated. Since osteocytes have a structure that is continuous with osteocytic processes (countless cellular processes protruding from the cell body), extracting the morphologies of individual cells using the conventional fluorescence binarization method is a tall order. In this application note, we introduce an example of the use of Segment.ai, one of the functions of the NIS.ai module for microscopes, to automate segmentation of osteocytic lacunae in order to facilitate measurement of their numbers and morphology.