Automatic nuclei segmentation in H&E stained breast cancer histopathology images

The introduction of fast digital slide scanners that provide whole slide images has led to a revival of interest in image analysis applications in pathology. Segmentation of cells and nuclei is an important first step towards automatic analysis of digitized microscopy images. We therefore developed an automated nuclei segmentation method that works with hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) stained breast cancer histopathology images, which represent regions of whole digital slides. The procedure can be divided into four main steps: 1) pre-processing with color unmixing and morphological operators, 2) marker-controlled watershed segmentation at multiple scales and with different markers, 3) post-processing for rejection of false regions and 4) merging of the results from multiple scales. The procedure was developed on a set of 21 breast cancer cases (subset A) and tested on a separate validation set of 18 cases (subset B). The evaluation was done in terms of both detection accuracy (sensitivity and positive predictive value) and segmentation accuracy (Dice coefficient). The mean estimated sensitivity for subset A was 0.875 (±0.092) and for subset B 0.853 (±0.077). The mean estimated positive predictive value was 0.904 (±0.075) and 0.886 (±0.069) for subsets A and B, respectively. For both subsets, the distribution of the Dice coefficients had a high peak around 0.9, with the vast majority of segmentations having values larger than 0.8.