Image quilting and wavelet fusion for creation of synthetic microscopy nuclei images

In this study a texture simulation methodology is proposed for composing synthetic tissue microscopy images that could serve as a quantitative gold standard for the evaluation of the reliability, accuracy and performance of segmentation algorithms in computer-aided diagnosis.

A library of background and nuclei regions was generated using pre-segmented Haematoxylin and Eosin images of brain tumours. Background image samples were used as input to an image quilting algorithm that produced the synthetic background image. Randomly selected pre-segmented nuclei were randomly fused on the synthetic background using a wavelet-based fusion approach. To investigate whether the produced synthetic images are meaningful and similar to real world images, two different tests were performed, one qualitative by an experienced histopathologist and one quantitative using the normalized mutual information and the Kullback-Leibler tests. To illustrate the challenges that synthetic images may pose to object recognition algorithms, two segmentation methodologies were utilized for nuclei detection, one based on the Otsu thresholding and another based on the seeded region growing approach.

Results showed a satisfactory to good resemblance of the synthetic with the real world images according to both qualitative and quantitative tests. The segmentation accuracy was slightly higher for the seeded region growing algorithm (87.2%) than the Otsu's algorithm (86.3%).

Since we know the exact coordinates of the regions of interest within the synthesised images, these images could then serve as a 'gold standard' for evaluation of segmentation algorithms in computer-aided diagnosis in tissue microscopy.