Mitochondria detection in electron microscopy images

Objective We present an approach for detecting mitochondria in electron microscopy images of brain tissue and demonstrate it on the rat neuropil. This would enable the study of statistics of mitochondria and their location relative to other structures such as cell boundaries, vesicles and synapses. Neural tissue from the Lateral part of the rat's brain was cut into 50nm slices and photographed with a Transmission Electron Microscope (TEM) to generate a 3D stack of grayscale images. Figure 1 shows an example of the images obtained. Appearance of mitochondria is characterized by dark ribbed texture. The detection is challenging : 1. The density of the ribbing varies across mitochondria. 2. Mitochondria have approximately tubular shape with variable length and cross-section.