Automatic Image Segmentation Method for In Vitro Wound Healing Assay Quantitative Analysis

In vitro wound healing assay is a useful method to assess cell proliferation and migration, in this context quan-tification of the process is a critical step. Objective: to develop an automatic segmentation method for wound healing image analysis. Methods: sixty sequential images of two liver tumor-derived cell lines were acquired and processed with a region growing-based segmentation algorithm performed in MATLAB. Results: after image processing HepG2 cells pre-sented a low migration rate respect to SkHep1. Although there were visual differences during evaluation of automatic meth-odology with a manual segmentation carried out under the supervision of an expert, the average differences determined as percentage of wound region (%WR) in image segmentation were just of 0.97% (n=44) for HepG2 and 0.32% (n=16) in SkHep1. Conclusion: this novel approach is a simple alterna-tive to quantify wound healing assay on sequential images.