1. A computer program product, comprising a computer usable medium having a computer readable program code embodied therein, said computer readable program code adapted to be executed to implement a method of segmenting chromatin particles in the nucleus of a cell, the method comprising: (i) locating regional minima in an image; (ii) computing a zone of influence (ZOI) around each regional minimum; (iii) taking the union of the regional minima and the boundaries of the ZOIs to form a set of markers/seeds; (iv) segmenting a single chromatin blob within each ZOI by applying a region growing procedure initiated from the set of markers/seeds; and (v) computing a feature set representing the segmented chromatin particles, wherein the feature set is displayed to a user.