An Iterative Mesh Optimization Method for 3D Meristem Reconstruction at Cell Level

This paper focuses on the reconstruction of 3-dimensional multi-lay-ered triangular mesh representations of plant cell tissues, based on segmented images obtained from confocal microscopy of shoot apical meristems of model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. Obtaining good-quality meshes of cell interfaces in plant tissues is currently a missing step in the existing image analysis pipelines. We propose a method for optimizing the quality of such a mesh representation of the tissue simultaneously along several different citeria, starting from a low-quality mesh. An iterative process minimizes an energy functional defined over this discrete structure, by deforming its geometry and updating its connectivity at fixed complexity. This optimization results in a light discrete representation of the cell surfaces that enables fast visualization, and quantitative analysis, and gives way to in silico physical and mechanical simulations on real-world data. We also propose a complete quantitative evaluation scheme to measure the quality of the cell tissue reconstruction, that demonstrates the capacity of our method to fit multiple optimization criteria.