Resumen

In medicine and pharmacology it is common to use animal models for the development and evaluation of new medications, since, by ethics, it is not possible to cause harm or experiment with humans. However, little has been done in biomedical engineering to facilitate the work of scientists for studies on these models. In particular, a difficulty that arises in the analysis of muscle tissue is the identification and counting of cells in microscopy images of lower rat limbs. This task is usually done manually, which makes it tedious, subjective, inaccurate, not reproducible and expensive in time. For this reason, in this work a semi-automatic technique was developed based on image processing techniques that allows to accelerate the cell counting process, significantly reducing the analysis time and increasing the accuracy. An editing tool was included to correct the results obtained. For the study, images provided by the Stem Cell Laboratory of the Department of Physiology and Pathological Transplantation of the University of Milan, Italy were used. The method implemented as a tool of the ImageJ program was evaluated and compared with Ground Truth images, obtaining a reduction in time of 83%.