Fully unsupervised M-FISH chromosome image characterization

Chromosome analysis is an important and difficult task for clinical diagnosis and biological research. A color imaging technique, multiplex fluorescent in situ hybridization (M-FISH), has been developed to ease the analysis of the process. Using an M-FISH technique each chromosome class (1,2, …,22,X,Y) is stained with a unique color. However, significant variations between images are observed due to a number of factors such as uneven hybridization and spectral overlap among channels. These types of variations influence the pixel classification accuracy of image classification methods which are supervised and require a set of annotated images for training. In this paper, we present a fully unsupervised M-FISH chromosome image classification methodology. Our main contributions are 1) the assumption that the intensity of a chromosome pixel is sampled from multiple Gaussian components [Gaussian mixture model (GMM)] such that each component corresponds to one chromosome class, and 2) the initialization of the GMM model using the emission information of each chromosome class. This is feasible since prior to the M-FISH image acquirement, we already know which chromosome class is emitting to each of the five M-FISH image channels. The method has been tested on a large number of M-FISH images and an overall accuracy of 89.85% is reported. Our method is unsupervised and presents higher classification accuracy even when it is compared with common supervised based methods. Since the developed classification method does not require training data, it is highly convenient when ground truth does not exist.