Automated mitosis detection in histopathology using morphological and multi-channel statistics features

CONTEXT: According to Nottingham grading system, mitosis count plays a critical role in cancer diagnosis and grading. Manual counting of mitosis is tedious and subject to considerable inter- and intra-reader variations. AIMS: The aim is to improve the accuracy of mitosis detection by selecting the color channels that better capture the statistical and morphological features, which classify mitosis from other objects. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We propose a framework that includes comprehensive analysis of statistics and morphological features in selected channels of various color spaces that assist pathologists in mitosis detection. In candidate detection phase, we perform Laplacian of Gaussian, thresholding, morphology and active contour model on blue-ratio image to detect and segment candidates. In candidate classification phase, we extract a total of 143 features including morphological, first order and second order (texture) statistics features for each candidate in selected channels and finally classify using decision tree classifier. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION: The proposed method has been evaluated on Mitosis Detection in Breast Cancer Histological Images (MITOS) dataset provided for an International Conference on Pattern Recognition 2012 contest and achieved 74% and 71% detection rate, 70% and 56% precision and 72% and 63% F-Measure on Aperio and Hamamatsu images, respectively. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK: The proposed multi-channel features computation scheme uses fixed image scale and extracts nuclei features in selected channels of various color spaces. This simple but robust model has proven to be highly efficient in capturing multi-channels statistical features for mitosis detection, during the MITOS international benchmark. Indeed, the mitosis detection of critical importance in cancer diagnosis is a very challenging visual task. In future work, we plan to use color deconvolution as preprocessing and Hough transform or local extrema based candidate detection in order to reduce the number of candidates in mitosis and non-mitosis classes.