Morphological and textural analysis of centroblasts in low-thickness sliced tissue biopsies of follicular lymphoma

Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2014:2014:3374-7. doi: 10.1109/EMBC.2014.6944346.

Abstract

This paper presents a new method for discriminating centroblast (CB) from non-centroblast cells in microscopic images acquired from tissue biopsies of follicular lymphoma. In the proposed method tissue sections are sliced at a low thickness level, around 1-1.5 μm, which provides a more detailed depiction of the nuclei and other textural information of cells usually not distinguishable in thicker specimens, such as 4-5 μm, that have been used in the past by other researchers. To identify CBs, a morphological and textural analysis is applied in order to extract various features related to their nuclei, nucleoli and cytoplasm. The generated feature vector is then used as input in a two-class SVM classifier with ε-Support Vector Regression and radial basis kernel function. Experimental results with an annotated dataset consisting of 300 images of centroblasts and non-centroblasts, derived from high-power field images of follicular lymphoma stained with Hematoxylin and Eosin, have shown the great potential of the proposed method with an average detection rate of 97.44%.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Biopsy
  • Cell Nucleolus / pathology
  • Cell Shape
  • Endothelial Cells / pathology
  • Humans
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted*
  • Lymphoma, Follicular / diagnosis*
  • Lymphoma, Follicular / pathology*