Improving reliability of live/dead cell counting through automated image mosaicing

Cell counting is one of the basic needs of most biological experiments. Numerous methods and systems have been studied to improve the reliability of counting. However, at present, manual cell counting performed with a hemocytometer still represents the gold standard, despite several problems limiting reproducibility and repeatability of the counts and, in the end, compromising their reliability in general. We present our own approach based on image processing techniques to improve counting reliability. In particular, we introduce GridMos, a fully-automated mosaicing method to obtain a mosaic representing the entire hemocytometer's grid. In addition to offering more significant statistics, the mosaic "freezes" the culture status, thus permitting analysis by more than one operator. Furthermore, the mosaic achieved can thus be tagged, thus markedly improving counting reliability. The experiments performed confirm the improvements brought about by the proposed counting approach in terms of both reproducibility and repeatability.