Algorithms to Automatically Measure Number of Splitting and Merging of Fascicular Groups in Peripheral Nerve from MicroCT images

It is very significant to mining the rules of splitting and merging of fascicular groups in the peripheral nerve during its extension in space through measuring the number of splitting and merging of them. Presently, the number of splitting and merging is counted manually, which is deficient and easy to make mistakes. So, this paper proposed two algorithms to count the number of splitting and merging from MicroCT images automatically. The Algorithm No.1 counts the number of splitting and merging through calculating the difference between two sequential images. The Algorithm No.2 counts the number of splitting and merging through tracking the centroid of each nerve bundle. Experiments show that, the Algorithm No.2 can not only correctly count the times while the nerve bundles split and merge on the same image, but also accurately count the times when a nerve bundle splits into more than two, and three or more fascicular groups merge into a same nerve bundle. The precision of counting of Algorithm No.2 reaches 100%. This investigation is one of the important basic for exploring the rules of splitting and merging.