Efficient Segmentation of Cell Nuclei in Histopathological Images

Oscar Cuadros Linares, Aurea Soriano-Vargas, Bruno S. Faiçal, Bernd Hamann, Alexandre Todorovic Fabro, Agma J. M. Traina

Abstract: Computer-aided cell nuclei segmentation in histology images is essential for image analysis. There is a demand for methods that accurately detect cell nuclei in large images. We introduce the FECS method for automatic cell nuclei segmentation in Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) stained histology images. Our method accurately segments cell nuclei, even in large images, efficiently. We use bimodal-like histograms to perform image binarization via the fast Otsu algorithm. We introduce a super-pixel based filter for cell nuclei boundary detection. A Gaussian blur filter allows us to identify cell nuclei centers, which are understood as local minima in the individual cell nuclei regions. We have evaluated our method for two publicly available datasets. Out tests have produced average Jaccard index values of 0.963 and 0.914, respectively, supporting a high degree of segmentation accuracy. We have compared our method against a state-of-the-art method; our method produced better results for both datasets. The average processing time of FECS was approximately just one second for images of 1k x 1k pixel resolution and about three minutes for larger images of 15k x 15k pixel resolution.