Automatic segmentation of colon glands using object-graphs

Med Image Anal. 2010 Feb;14(1):1-12. doi: 10.1016/j.media.2009.09.001. Epub 2009 Sep 19.

Abstract

Gland segmentation is an important step to automate the analysis of biopsies that contain glandular structures. However, this remains a challenging problem as the variation in staining, fixation, and sectioning procedures lead to a considerable amount of artifacts and variances in tissue sections, which may result in huge variances in gland appearances. In this work, we report a new approach for gland segmentation. This approach decomposes the tissue image into a set of primitive objects and segments glands making use of the organizational properties of these objects, which are quantified with the definition of object-graphs. As opposed to the previous literature, the proposed approach employs the object-based information for the gland segmentation problem, instead of using the pixel-based information alone. Working with the images of colon tissues, our experiments demonstrate that the proposed object-graph approach yields high segmentation accuracies for the training and test sets and significantly improves the segmentation performance of its pixel-based counterparts. The experiments also show that the object-based structure of the proposed approach provides more tolerance to artifacts and variances in tissues.

Publication types

  • Evaluation Study
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Artificial Intelligence*
  • Colon / cytology*
  • Humans
  • Image Enhancement / methods
  • Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / methods*
  • Microscopy / methods*
  • Pattern Recognition, Automated / methods*
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Sensitivity and Specificity