DOI

https://doi.org/10.25772/HY6K-SJ78

Defense Date

2009

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Department

Biomedical Engineering

First Advisor

Gary Bowlin

Abstract

The purpose of this work was to develop an automated method of measuring fiber diameters of electrospun scaffolds from scanning electron microscopy images of these scaffolds. Several automated methods were developed and evaluated by comparison to known values and data obtained via the standard manual method. Simulated images with known diameters were used as test images to evaluate the accuracy of each measurement technique. Eight scanning electron microscopy images were also used for the evaluation of the automated methods compared to the standard manual method. All diameter measurements were made in pixels. Five new automated methods coded in MATLAB were developed. The five methods varied the approach of identifying edges of fibers as well as assigning edges to single fibers and calculating the distance between edges assigned to the same fiber. One-way analysis of variance and the Tukey-Kramer tests were performed for comparison of all methods per image. The Custom Canny Slopes automated method was shown to accurately approximate the mean diameters in ten simulated images as well as microscopy image of real scaffolds (p<0.05).

Rights

© The Author

Is Part Of

VCU University Archives

Is Part Of

VCU Theses and Dissertations

Date of Submission

December 2009

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