Patent ID: 7660449

Claim:
A method for the measurement of residual protein in a cellular specimen, comprising: providing a stained subsample from a cellular specimen; obtaining a low magnification image of a candidate object of interest comprising obtaining a plurality of pixels in the subsample; filtering the candidate object of interest pixels with a low pass filter; morphologically processing the candidate object of interest pixels to identify artifact pixels; identifying the candidate object of interest by eliminating artifact pixels; acquiring a higher magnification image of the subsample, at location coordinates corresponding to the low magnification image, for the candidate object of interest; transforming pixels of the higher magnification image in a first color space to a second color space to differentiate higher magnification candidate object of interest pixels from background pixels; identifying, an object of interest from the candidate object of interest pixels in the second color space; and determining the optical density of the protein in a cell contained in a subsample, wherein the optical density is indicative of the residual component of a cellular protein.