Marker-controlled watershed segmentation of nuclei in H&E stained breast cancer biopsy images

In this paper we present an unsupervised automatic method for segmentation of nuclei in H&E stained breast cancer biopsy images. Colour deconvolution and morphological operations are used to preprocess the images in order to remove irrelevant structures. Candidate nuclei locations, obtained with...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in2011 IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging: From Nano to Macro pp. 618 - 621
Main Authors Veta, M, Huisman, A, Viergever, M A, van Diest, P J, Pluim, J P W
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.03.2011
Subjects
Accuracy
Biopsy
Breast cancer
histology images
Image segmentation
Marker-controlled watershed
nuclei segmentation
Pathology
Pattern recognition
Transforms
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ISBN1424441277
9781424441273
ISSN1945-7928
DOI10.1109/ISBI.2011.5872483

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Summary:In this paper we present an unsupervised automatic method for segmentation of nuclei in H&E stained breast cancer biopsy images. Colour deconvolution and morphological operations are used to preprocess the images in order to remove irrelevant structures. Candidate nuclei locations, obtained with the fast radial symmetry transform, act as markers for a marker-controlled watershed segmentation. Watershed regions that are unlikely to represent nuclei are removed in the postprocessing stage. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on a number of images that are representative of the diversity in pathology in this type of tissue. The method shows good performance in terms of the number of segmented nuclei and segmentation accuracy.
ISBN:1424441277
9781424441273
ISSN:1945-7928
DOI:10.1109/ISBI.2011.5872483