Help with shape descriptors

[Claiborne Morton]

Hello Scikit community, 

I'm looking for help using particle descriptors to identify sickle cells in 
the attached image. As you can see the sickle cells are the long, thin 
cells. I have two issues, the first is that in some cases the sickle cells 
are in contact with other healthy cells. I am trying to find a way of 
separating (or water-shedding) the cells so that each "particle" is 
actually one cell. The second issue is that I am dealing with is trying to 
find shape descriptors that will allow me to accurately distinguish the 
sickle cells from the healthy cells. 

I used an eccentricity filter on the original image to remove all of the 
cells with eccentricity less than 0.6. Making this any higher results in 
removal of sickle cells. What other descriptors might be used for further 
differentiation?

Thanks, Clay 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/scikit-image/attachments/20141209/05114772/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: red.png
Type: image/png
Size: 19292 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/scikit-image/attachments/20141209/05114772/attachment.png>