Computational Counting for a Quantitative Analysis of Cells in Histologically Prepared Brain Sections

We propose a reliable method for automatic counting of cells in brain sections for different antibodies (NeuN, parvalbumin, GABA and c-Fos) and nissl-staining. The images of thin stained sections are binarized by thresholding. Then regions are clustered using a common clustering algorithm. After choosing only proper sized clusters the detected cell-bodies are counted. The parameters of the algorithm are adjusted manually and remain constant for different probes. The computational cell counting method provides correct counting results which is shown by a comparison of computational results and counts gained by human experimenters