Obtaining a solid model from optical serial sections

摘要

An approach for obtaining a three-dimensional solid display of microscopic-scale objects obtained via optical serial sectioning is presented. Serial sections are obtained by incrementing the focusing plane of a microscope through a specimen of interest, resulting in a sequence of two-dimensional images comprising a three-dimensional image of optical density. Unfortunately, the limited aperture of any practical microscope results in the loss of a biconic region of frequencies from the three-dimensional spectrum of optical density, and a low-pass distortion of the remaining frequencies. These degradations make the extraction of accurate three-dimensional structural or morphological information difficult. While the low-pass distortion can be improved by inverse filtering, the loss of frequencies is not reversible.However, within the resolution imposed by the finite aperture, a solid model can be obtained. By applying an edge detector to the sequence of inverse-filtered images, contours of high activity can be delineated. Generally these will be noisy and spread throughout the interior of the specimen; however, by applying appropriate mathematical morphological techniques and other region correction procedures the edges can be aggregated into a solid (volumetric) model suitable for display in a cuberille environment.