Using active contours and mathematical morphology tools for quantificationof immunohistochemical images

An image segmentation method is proposed, which combines mathematical morph ology tools and active contours in two stages. First, contours are coarsely approximated by means of morphological operators. Second, these initial co ntours evolve under the influence of geometric and grey-level information, owing to the model of active contours. The performance of the method is eva luated according to the noise and is compared to the watershed algorithm. T hen an application is finally presented for biomedical images of tumour tis sue. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.