Inter-chromosome texture as a feature for automatic identification of metaphase spreads

This paper reports results for a new measure of texture coarseness, as a step towards automation of metaphase finding in cell-proliferation studies. This measure is highly specific to grey-level inter-chromosome coarseness features in microscopic images of metaphase spreads and allows the texture quantification of cytological objects, analysing the intensity profile between chromosome-extrema samples. Chromosome fragments produce patterns of pixels at low resolution, and the local neighbourhood of their individual extrema presents a characteristic coarseness along intensity profiles, on randomly oriented test lines. Results of the use of this new measure on microscope images of fields of metaphases and artifacts are compared with some representative texture measures and the performance of reported metaphase finders. This new measure outperforms the latter, when applied in metaphase detection and elimination of artifacts. This coarseness feature provides a specific metaphase signature that can be used in conjunction with other morphological and textural parameters for automated metaphase discrimination.