Algorithm for Measuring Morphology of Myotube in Space Experiments

In order to meet the autonomous needs of space missions, explore the effects of space environmen-tal factors on astronaut muscle atrophy and the role of drug molecules on myotube differentiation, researchers deter-mine the effect of drug molecules on myotube by observing the growth status of myotube. At this stage, researchers measured the width of myotube manually and analyzed the growth status of myotube by measuring the cell width. In order to achieve the automatic measurement of morphological parameters of myotube, an algorithm based on curva-ture and spline fitting was proposed to automatically measure the morphological parameters of myotube. Firstly, the cell image was preprocessed to separate the cells from the background, and then the cell boundary was fitted by spline interpolation which helped to calculate the normal vector and curvature of the boundary points. Secondly, the match-ing points were found by the normal vector to compute the cell width. What’s more, the cell endpoints were found by curvature and thus the cytoskeleton was fitted to measure the cell length. The experimental results showed that the morphological parameters obtained by the algorithm were consistent with the manual measurement distribution. The algorithm achieves the morphological measurement of myotube, and the average time of cell measurement is short-ened by 85.2%, which greatly improves the research and development efficiency of scientific researchers.