ABSTRACT
Cellular and tissue engineering is a developing research eld that aims to regenerate tissues and restore organ functions, which focus on the precise controls of structure and function at cellular resolution via the extracellular microenvironments (Langer and Vacanti, 1993). Both the top-down and bottom-up approaches (Ananthanarayanan et al., 2011) that are widely adopted in the eld to construct tissues require the understanding of cell and tissue responses to biomaterials or tissue-engineered constructs at dierent levels. Imaging techniques play an important role to serve this purpose by medical imaging modalities at the tissue and organ level in vivo and by microscopic imaging modalities at the cell level in vitro. While the details of these imaging modalities are elaborated in this book, image analysis methods to interpret the images from these imaging modalities are equally important. e common approach of image analysis through manual visualization is qualitative and has several limitations, including low throughput, high observer variations, and diculties in evaluating high-dimensional images (Peng, 2008). Hence, image analysis methods that incorporate both automated image processing and pattern recognition tools are attracting increasing interest in cellular and tissue engineering
13.1 Introduction ......................................................................................223 13.2 Image Segmentation .........................................................................224
