Trying to separate touching mouse chromosomes

In the previous post, from a cluster of touching mouse chromosomes:

points belonging to negatively curved domains of a contour can be isolated :

Yellow points belong to negatively curved domains of the contour.

To separate the chromosomes, it is tempting to cut between the closest pairs of points.

Let's make combination of pairs of points belonging to the contour:

Python provides itertools.combinations(); the closest pairs of points are in the set of the combinations of every pairs of points:

Path between two points belonging to the countour:

Each line shows the euclidian distance between two points, the four shortest lines correspond more or less to the contact domains between the chromosomes, cuting along them provides a way to separate the chromosomes.

It should be possible to do better by using a geodesic distance between the points, that is using a path inside the cluster of chromosomes. In the following example:

On the left, two paths (depending on the chosen pixel neighborhood) between the two blue points were overlaid on a binary image (background is set to 255 and the foreground to 0). The path were determined as follow using skimage 0.8dev:

graph.route_through_array(negbin ,p1,p2,fully_connected=False)

 or

 graph.route_through_array(negbin ,p1,p2,fully_connected=True)

• negbin: the negative binary image
• p1, p2: the two points figured in blue.

On the right the background (0) was set to 255 (white), the path (red) between the two points was determined by minimizing the "greyscale cost", that is through the valleys between the two points is the image is viewed as a greyscaled landscape.

All the paths can be determined (left), and then the paths can be sorted according to their cost (right). The four paths with the smallest cost are figured in red (left).

Download code.

or see bellow: