Shape and Boundary Similarity Features for Accurate HCC Image Recognition

Nucleus morphology is of great importance in conventional cancer pathological diagnosis, which could provide information difference between normal and abnormal nuclei visually. Therefore, this paper proposes two novel kinds of features for normal and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) nucleus recognition, including shape and boundary similarity. First, each individual nucleus patch with the fixed size is obtained using center-proliferation segmentation (CPS) method. Then, nucleus shape library is constructed based on manual selection by pathologists, which is utilized to measure nucleus shape similarity via Dice, Jaccard, precision, and recall coefficients. Meanwhile, boundary similarity is evaluated through triangles composed of some boundary feature points for each nucleus. Finally, the conventional random forest (RF) is used to train and test the classification model for HCC nucleus recognition. Extensive cross-validation tests could facilitate the selection of the optimal feature set and the experiment comparison results demonstrate that our proposed morphological features are more beneficial for classification compared with other traditional characteristics.