Research Article TMA Vessel Segmentation Based on Color and Morphological

Copyright © 2013 M. Milagro Fernández-Carrobles et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Given that angiogenesis and lymphangiogenesis are strongly related to prognosis in neoplastic and other pathologies and that many methods exist that provide different results, we aim to construct a morphometric tool allowing us to measure different aspects of the shape and size of vascular vessels in a complete and accurate way.The developed tool presented is based on vessel closing which is an essential property to properly characterize the size and the shape of vascular and lymphatic vessels. The method is fast and accurate improving existing tools for angiogenesis analysis. The tool also improves the accuracy of vascular density measurements, since the set of endothelial cells forming a vessel is considered as a single object. 1. Background Angiogenesis is present during development as well as during embryogenesis and during reparative processes for wound healing. It also has a significant role during organ transplanta-tion since new vessel formation can be crucial to successfully prevent allograft rejection. The role of angiogenesis in th