CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS
Advanced Search
Home > Journals > J. Med. Imag. > Volume 4 > Issue 2 > Article
Open Access
21 June 2017 Automatic extraction of cell nuclei from H&E-stained histopathological images
Faliu Yi, Junzhou Huang, Lin Yang, Yang Xie, Guanghua Xiao
Author Affiliations +
Journal of Medical Imaging, Vol. 4, Issue 2, 027502 (June 2017). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JMI.4.2.027502
Abstract
Extraction of cell nuclei from hematoxylin and eosin (H&E)-stained histopathological images is an essential preprocessing step in computerized image analysis for disease detection, diagnosis, and prognosis. We present an automated cell nuclei segmentation approach that works with H&E-stained images. A color deconvolution algorithm was first applied to the image to get the hematoxylin channel. Using a morphological operation and thresholding technique on the hematoxylin channel image, candidate target nuclei and background regions were detected, which were then used as markers for a marker-controlled watershed transform segmentation algorithm. Moreover, postprocessing was conducted to split the touching nuclei. For each segmented region from the previous steps, the regional maximum value positions were identified as potential nuclei centers. These maximum values were further grouped into k-clusters, and the locations within each cluster were connected with the minimum spanning tree technique. Then, these connected positions were utilized as new markers for a watershed segmentation approach. The final number of nuclei at each region was determined by minimizing an objective function that iterated all of the possible k-values. The proposed method was applied to the pathological images of the tumor tissues from The Cancer Genome Atlas study. Experimental results show that the proposed method can lead to promising results in terms of segmentation accuracy and separation of touching nuclei.
CC BY: © The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publication, including its DOI.
Citation Download Citation
Faliu Yi, Junzhou Huang, Lin Yang, Yang Xie, and Guanghua Xiao "Automatic extraction of cell nuclei from H&E-stained histopathological images," Journal of Medical Imaging 4(2), 027502 (21 June 2017). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JMI.4.2.027502
Received: 8 March 2017; Accepted: 31 May 2017; Published: 21 June 2017
JOURNAL ARTICLE
 12 PAGES
DOWNLOAD PAPER SAVE TO MY LIBRARY
GET CITATION
Lens.org Logo
CITATIONS
Cited by 34 scholarly publications and 1 patent.
Advertisement
Advertisement
KEYWORDS
Image segmentation
Detection and tracking algorithms
Image processing algorithms and systems
Cancer
Deconvolution
Image analysis
Target detection
RELATED CONTENT
Subscribe to Digital Library
Receive Erratum Email Alert
Back to Top