Title: A morphologically driven gradient and marker controlled distance regularised level sets for nuclear segmentation in histopathological images

Authors: P.M. Shivamurthy; T.N. Nagabhushan; Bhanu Prasad; Vijaya Basavaraj

Addresses: Sri Jayachamarajendra College of Engineering, Mysuru, 570006, India ' Sri Jayachamarajendra College of Engineering, Mysuru, 570006, India ' Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Florida A&M University, Tallahassee, Florida 32307, USA ' Department of Pathology, JSS Hospital, Mysuru, 570004, India

Abstract: The extraction of suitable biomarkers over a tissue image plays a vital role in the diagnosis and prognosis of cancer disease. Nuclear pleomorphism is one such trait, which serves as an important shape-based biomarker. An effective segmentation of the nuclei objects leads to an accurate diagnosis by an expert pathologist, which otherwise would be erroneous due to inter and intra-observer variability. In this research, a novel approach for segmenting the nuclei objects, using distance regularised level sets (DRLS), has been presented. It is shown that the shape prior based morphological transformation of the image achieves: a) centroid detection for accurate contour initialisation; b) gradient computation for an effective contour evolution. Experiments have been conducted on benign and malignant tissue images followed by a performance study using the object detection and the overlap resolution accuracy. Segmentation accuracy is assessed in comparison with the geodesic active contours, based on the ground truth.

Keywords: DRLS; distance regularised level set; centroid detection; morphological transformation; shape prior.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSISE.2019.100682

International Journal of Signal and Imaging Systems Engineering, 2019 Vol.11 No.5, pp.300 - 309

Received: 04 Jun 2018
Accepted: 11 Dec 2018
Published online: 06 Jul 2019 *

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