Figure 2.

Methodology used to measure mitochondrial structure through computing a connectedness factor. (a) Color channeling on the image of the stained cell followed by a decision tree is used to separate out the mitochondrial features (b). Preprocessing steps followed by adaptive thresholding is used for segmentation of the mitochondrial network to identify individual mitochondria (c), for identifying branches (individual mitochondrion) and branch points (mitochondrial joints). Each branch is used as a mask to perform measurements such as length, width, and area on each individual mitochondrion so that the connectedness factor can be computed (eq 6), as indicated by the red dashed line in panel d.