LCuts: Linear Clustering of Bacteria using Recursive Graph Cuts

Bacterial biofilm segmentation poses significant challenges due to lack of apparent structure, poor imaging resolution, limited contrast between conterminous cells and high density of cells that overlap. Although there exist bacterial segmentation algorithms in the existing art, they fail to delineate cells in dense biofilms, especially in 3D imaging scenarios in which the cells are growing and subdividing in a complex manner. A graph-based data clustering method, LCuts, is presented with the application on bacterial cell segmentation. By constructing a weighted graph with node features in locations and principal orientations, the proposed method can automatically classify and detect differently oriented aggregations of linear structures (represent by bacteria in the application). The method assists in the assessment of several facets, such as bacterium tracking, cluster growth, and mapping of migration patterns of bacterial biofilms. Quantitative and qualitative measures for 2D data demonstrate the superiority of proposed method over the state of the art. Preliminary 3D results exhibit reliable classification of the cells with 97% accuracy.