Abstract
The early diagnosis of lymphatic system tumors heavily relies on the computerized morphological analysis of blood cells in microscopic specimen images. Automating this analysis necessarily requires an accurate segmentation of the cells themselves. In this paper, we propose a robust method for the automatic segmentation of microscopic images. Cell segmentation is achieved following a coarse-to-fine approach, which primarily consists in the rough identification of the blood cell and, then, in the refinement of the nucleus contours by means of a neural model. The method proposed has been applied to different case studies, revealing its actual feasibility.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Zh. V. Churakova, I. B. Gurevich, I. A. Jernova, et al., “Selection of Diagnostically Valuable Features for Morphological Analysis of Blood Cells,” Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis: Advances in Mathematical Theory and Applications 13(2), 381–383 (2003).
E. S. Jaffe, N. L. Harris, and H. Stein, et al., Pathology and Genetics of Tumors of Haematopoietic and Lymphoid Tissues (IARC Press, Lyon, 2001).
S. Colantonio, I. B. Gurevich, O. Salvetti, “Automatic Fuzzy-Neural Based Segmentation of Microscopic Cell Images,” International Journal of Signal and Imaging Systems Engineering, Inderscience, 1 (in press).
C. Di Rubeto, A. Dempster, S. Khan, and B. Jarra, “Segmentation of Blood Image Using Morphological Operators,” in Proceedings 15th Int. Conference on Pattern Recognition 2000, 3, pp. 397–400.
D. Anoraganingrum, “Cell Segmentation with Median Filter and Mathematical Morphology Operation,” in Proceedings International Conference on Image Analysis and Processing (1999), pp. 1043–1046.
H. S. Wu, J. Barba, and J. Gil, Iterative Thresholding for Segmentation of Cells from Noisy Images (Journal of Microscopy, Blackwell Publishing 2000), Vol. 197, pp. 296–304.
T. Mouroutis, S. J. Roberts, and A. A. Bharath, “Robust Cell Nuclei Segmentation Using Statistical Modelling,” BioImaging, IOP 6, 79–91 (1998).
G. Lin, U. Adiga, K. Olson, J. F. Guzowski, C. A. Barnes, and B. Roysam, “A Hybrid 3D Watershed Algorithm Incorporating Gradient Cues and Object Models for Automatic Segmentation of Nuclei in Confocal Image Stacks,” Cytometry A 56,(1), 23–36 (2003).
P. S. Umesh Adiga and B. B. Chaudhuri, “An Efficient Method Based on Watershed and Rulebased Merging for Segmentation of 3-D Histopathological Images,” Pattern Recognition 34(7), 1449–1458 (2001).
A. Karlosson, K. Strahlen, and A. Heyden, “Segmentation of Histological Section Using Snakes,” in Proceedings of 13 Scandinavian Conference, SCIA 2003, Halmstad, Sweeden 2003, Eds. by J. Begun and T. Gustavsson, (LNCS 2749), pp. 595–602.
D. Murashov, “Two-Level Method for Segmentation of Cytological Images Using Active Contour Model,” in Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis, PRIA-7 2004, Chap. 3, pp. 814–817.
T. F. Cootes and C. J. Taylor, “Active Shape Models—Smart Snakes,” in Proceedings of the British Machine Vision Conference, Springer-Verlag 1992, pp. 266–275.
T. F. Cootes, C. Beeston, G. J. Edwards, and C. J. Taylor, “A Unified Framework for Atlas Matching Using Active Appearance Models,” in Information Processing in Medical Imaging, Eds. by A. Kuba and M. Samal, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Germany 1999), pp. 322–333.
N. Sebe and M. S. Lew, “Robust Computer Vision—Theory and Applications,” Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003.
S. Ghebreab and A. W. M. Smeulders, “Strings: Variational Deformable Models of Multivariate Continuous Boundary Features,” IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 25(11), 1399–1410 (2003).
L. C. Bezdek, “Pattern Recognition with Fuzzy Objective Function Algorithm,” New York: Plenum Press, 1981.
D. E. Rumelhart, G. E. Hinton, and R. J. Williams, Learning Internal Representations by Error Propagation, (Parallel Distribuited Processing, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 1986), pp. 318–362.
M. Riedmiller and H. Braun, “A Direct Adaptive Method for Faster Backpropagation Learning: The RPROP Algorithm,” in Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Neural Networks—ICNN, 1993, pp. 586–591.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
This article was submitted by the authors in English.
Sara Colantonio, M. Sc. honors degree in Computer Science from the University of Pisa in 2004, PhD student in Information Engineering at the Dept. of Information Engineering, Pisa University, is a research fellow at the Institute of Information Science and Technologies of the Italian National Research Council, in Pisa. She has a grant from Finmeccanica for studies in the field of image categorization with applications in medicine and quality control. Her main interests include neural networks, machine learning, industrial diagnostics, and medical imaging. She is a coauthor of more than fifteen scientific papers. At present, she is involved in a number of European research projects regarding image mining, information technology, and medical decision support systems.
Ovidio Salvetti, director of research at the Institute of Information Science and Technologies (ISTI) of the Italian National Research Council (CNR), in Pisa, is working in the field of theoretical and applied computer vision. His fields of research are image analysis and understanding, pictorial information systems, spatial modeling, and intelligent processes in computer vision.
He is a coauthor of four books and monographs and more than three hundred technical and scientific articles; he also possesses ten patents regarding systems and software tools for image processing. He has been a scientific coordinator of several national and European research and industrial projects, in collaboration with Italian and foreign research groups, in the fields of computer vision and high-performance computing for diagnostic imaging.
He is member of the editorial boards of the international journals Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis and G. Ronchi Foundation Acts. He is at present the CNR contact person in ERCIM (the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics) for the Working Group on Vision and Image Understanding, member of IEEE and of the steering committee of a number of EU projects. He is head of the ISTI Signals and Images Laboratory.
Igor B. Gurevich. Born 1938. Dr. Eng. [Diploma Engineer (Automatic Control and Electrical Engineering), 1961, Moscow Power Engineering Institute, Moscow, USSR]; Dr. (Theoretical Computer Science/Mathematical Cybernetics), 1975, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Moscow, USSR. Head of department at the Dorodnicyn Computing Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow; assistant professor at the Computer Science Faculty, Moscow State University. He has worked from 1960 to present as an engineer and researcher in industry, medicine, and universities and in the Russian Academy of Sciences. Area of expertise: image analysis, image understanding, mathematical theory of pattern recognition, theoretical computer science, pattern recognition and image analysis techniques for applications in medicine, nondestructive testing, process control, knowledge bases, knowledge-based systems. Two monographs (in coauthorship), 135 papers on pattern recognition, image analysis, theoretical computer science and applications in peer reviewed international and Russian journals, conference and workshop proceedings; one patent of the USSR, four patents of the RF Executive Secretary of the Russian Federation Association for Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis, member of the International Association for Pattern Recognition Governing Board (representative from the Russian Federation), IAPR fellow. He has been the PI of many research and development projects as part of national research (applied and basic research) programs of the Russian Academy of Sciences, of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, of the Soros Foundation, and of INTAS. Vice Editor-in-Chief of Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis, International Academic Publishing Company “Nauka/Interperiodica” Pleiades Publishing.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Colantonio, S., Salvetti, O. & Gurevich, I.B. A two-step approach for automatic microscopic image segmentation using fuzzy clustering and neural discrimination. Pattern Recognit. Image Anal. 17, 428–437 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1134/S1054661807030108
Received:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1134/S1054661807030108