VBET: Vesselness and Blob Enhancement Technique for 2d and 3d microscopy images of microglia

Microglia play significant roles in normal and pathologic brains. Microscopy images or videos of the mouse brain are the primary source for studying these cells in vivo. Due to low image contrast, enhancement is necessary before higher-level analysis. Existing techniques are not suitable for enhancing the complex structure of microglia. This paper proposes a novel technique (VBET) to enhance the blob and vessel-like structures of these cells. Experiments on 3D and 2D microglial images show that VBET preserves more structures than existing enhancement methods, and subsequent analyses, such as segmentation and microglial ramification, have higher accuracy than before (25% improvement in 3D Dice index, and 50% improvement in ramification index).