Classification of HEp-2 Staining Pattern Images Using Adapted Multilayer Perceptron Neural Network-Based Intra-Class Variation of Cell Shape.

There exists a growing interest from the clinical practice research communities in the development of methods to automate HEp-2 stained cells classification procedure from histopathological images. Challenges faced by these methods include variations in cell densities and cell patterns, overfitting of features, large-scale data volume and stained cells. In this paper, a multi-class multilayer perceptron technique is adapted by adding a new hidden layer to calculate the variation in the mean, scale, kurtosis and skewness of higher order spectra features of the cell shape information. The adapted technique is then jointly trained and the probability of classification calculated using a Softmax activation function. This method is proposed to address overfitting, stained and large-scale data volume problems, and classify HEp-2 staining cells into six classes. An extensive experimental analysis is studied to verify the results of the proposed method. The technique has been trained and tested on the dataset from ICPR-2014 and ICPR-2016 competitions using the Task-1. The experimental results have shown that the proposed model achieved higher accuracy of 90.3% (with data augmentation) than of 87.5% (with no data augmentation). In addition, the proposed framework is compared with existing methods, as well as, the results of methods using in ICPR2014 and ICPR2016 competitions.The results demonstrate that our proposed method effectively outperforms recent methods.

Segmentation of White Blood Cell, Nucleus and Cytoplasm in Digital Haematology Microscope Images: A Review-Challenges, Current and Future Potential Techniques.

Segmentation of white blood cells in digital haematology microscope images represents one of the major tools in the diagnosis and evaluation of blood disorders. Pathological examinations are being the gold standard in many haematology and histophathology, and also play a key role in the diagnosis of diseases. In clinical diagnosis, white blood cells are analysed by pathologists from peripheral blood smears samples of patients. This analysis is mainly based on morphological features and characteristics of the white blood cells and their nuclei and cytoplasm, including, shapes, sizes, colours, textures, maturity stages and staining processes. Recently, Computer Aided Diagnosis techniques have been rapidly growing in the digital haematology area related to white blood cells, and their nuclei and cytoplasm detection, as well as their segmentation and classification techniques. In digital haematology image analysis, these techniques have played and will continue to play, a vital role for providing traceable clinical information, consolidating pertinent second opinions, and minimizing human intervention. This study outlines, discusses, and introduces the major trends from a particular review of detection and segmentation methods for white blood cells and their nuclei and cytoplasm from digital haematology microscope images. Performance of existing methods have been comprehensively compared, taking into account databases used, number of images and limitations. This study can also help us to identify the challenges that remain, in achieving a robust analysis of white blood cell microscope images, which could support the diagnosis of blood disorders and assist researchers and pathologists in the future. The impact of this work is to enhance the accuracy of pathologists' decisions and their efficiency, and overall benefit the patients for faster and more accurate diagnosis. The significant of the paper on intelligent system is that provides future potential techniques for solving overlapping white blood cell identification and other problems microscopic images. The accurate segmentation and detection of white blood cells can increase the accuracy of cell counting system for diagnosing diseases in the future.

Evaluation and benchmarking of level set-based three forces via geometric active contours for segmentation of white blood cell nuclei shape.

The segmentation of white blood cells and their nuclei is still difficult and challenging for many reasons, including the differences in their colour, shape, background and staining techniques, the overlapping of cells, and changing cell topologies. This paper shows how these challenges can be addressed by using level set forces via edge-based geometric active contours. In this work, three level set forces-based (curvature, normal direction, and vector field) are comprehensively studied in the context of the problem of segmenting white blood cell nuclei based on geometric flows. Cell images are first pre-processed, using contrast stretching and morphological opening and closing in order to standardise the image colour intensity, to create an initial estimate of the cell foreground and to remove the narrow links between lobes and cell bulges. Next, segmentation is conducted to prune out the white blood cell nucleus region from the cell wall and cytoplasm by combining the theory of curve evolution using curvature, normal direction, and vector field-based level set forces and edge-based geometric active contours. The overall performance of the proposed segmentation method is compared and benchmarked against existing techniques for nucleus shape detection, using the same databases. The three level set forces studied here (curvature, normal direction, and vector field) via edge-based geometric active contours achieve F-index values of 92.09%, 91.13%, and 90.76%, respectively, and the proposed segmentation method results in better performance than all other techniques for all indices, including Jaccard distance, boundary displacement error, and Rand index.