objects [71, 72]. The medical imaging field offers a number of promising algorithms
that seek to optimize the surface of the object by balancing edge/region parameters
measured from the image with a priori information about the shape of the object
[73]. Despite their success in medical image analysis, boundary detection methods
are seldom optimal for microscopy data where the intensity changes are typically
gradual and heterogeneous along the surface. A major disadvantage of the edge-
based algorithms is that they can result in noisy, discontinuous edges that require
complex postprocessing to generate closed boundaries. Typically, discontinuous
boundaries are subsequently joined using morphological matching or energy
optimization techniques to find