- Title
- Segmentation of heavily clustered nuclei from histopathological images
- Creator
- Abdolhoseini, Mahmoud; Kluge, Murielle G.; Walker, Frederick R.; Johnson, Sarah J.
- Relation
- Scientific Reports Vol. 9, no. 4551
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-38813-2
- Publisher
- Nature Publishing Group
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2019
- Description
- Automated cell nucleus segmentation is the key to gain further insight into cell features and functionality which support computer-aided pathology in early diagnosis of diseases such as breast cancer and brain tumour. Despite considerable advances in automated segmentation, it still remains a challenging task to split heavily clustered nuclei due to intensity variations caused by noise and uneven absorption of stains. To address this problem, we propose a novel method applicable to variety of histopathological images stained for different proteins, with high speed, accuracy and level of automation. Our algorithm is initiated by applying a new locally adaptive thresholding method on watershed regions. Followed by a new splitting technique based on multilevel thresholding and the watershed algorithm to separate clustered nuclei. Finalized by a model-based merging step to eliminate oversegmentation and a model-based correction step to improve segmentation results and eliminate small objects. We have applied our method to three image datasets: breast cancer stained for hematoxylin and eosin (H&E), Drosophila Kc167 cells stained for DNA to label nuclei, and mature neurons stained for NeuN. Evaluated results show our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy, precision, F1-measure, and computational time.
- Subject
- segmentation; nuclei; pathology; cancer
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1408363
- Identifier
- uon:35830
- Identifier
- ISSN:2045-2322
- Rights
- © The Author(s) 2019. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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