Help removing unwanted lines from image and identify spots

After some enhancement I get the following image: http://i44.tinypic.com/2jfwsnd.jpg I want to identify the spots which clearly has a circle like shape, but the lines make it hard. any suggestions?

Answer 1

[Sean de Wolski]

1. Threshold to create a binary object
2. bwareaopen() to get rid of small stuff
3. imopen to get rid of lines;

[Elad]

Thanks!

that really pointed me to the right direction.

[Image Analyst]

Thresholding may not be necessary. Opening may get rid of the small stuff by itself, depending on how small the stuff is you want to get rid of. imopen works on a gray scale image in addition to a binary image. You could then threshold, then multiply the binary image by the gray image to get a gray scale image unaltered except where the lines were. Opening will alter the original even where you maybe don't want it to. Then you could use roifill on that masked image to get a relatively nice "fixed up" gray scale image, if you happen to need or want that. But if your main goal is to measure the round spots and it can be thresholded adequately then might as well threshold as the first step and then get rid of lines, like Sean said.