Denoising 3D microscopy images of cell nuclei using shape priors on an anisotropic grid

Abstract

This paper presents a new multiscale method to denoise three-dimensional images of cell nuclei. The speci- ficity of this method is its awareness of the noise distribution and object shapes. It combines a multiscale representation called Isotropic Undecimated Wavelet Transform (IUWT) with a nonlinear transform, a statistical test and a variational method, to retrieve spherical shapes in the image. Beyond extending an existing 2D approach to a 3D problem, our algorithm takes the sampling grid dimensions into account. We compare our method to the two algorithms from which it is derived on a representative image analysis task, and show that it is superior to both of them. It brings a slight improvement in the signal-to-noise ratio and a significant improvement in cell detection