Figure 1.

Pipeline for automatic quantitative blood vessel analysis

(A) Sample preparation includes blood vessel staining and tissue clearing.

(B–D) (B) Microscopic imaging of blood vessels. Generated blood vessel images (C) are processed via VesselExpress (D). In the segmentation, the raw images are binarized into foreground, representing the vessels, and background (D1). The segmentation mask is used to extract the vessels’ centerlines (D2). Undirected graphs are constructed from the skeleton mask and used for subsequent data analysis (D3).

(E) The results are quantified phenotypical data tables for statistical analysis and image masks for visual inspection of segmentation and skeletonization (E).