Marker controlled superpixel nuclei segmentation and automatic counting on immunohistochemistry staining images

For the diagnosis of cancer, manually counting nuclei on massive histopathological images is tedious and the counting results might vary due to the subjective nature of the operation.

This paper presents a new segmentation and counting method for nuclei, which can automatically provide nucleus counting results. This method segments nuclei with detected nuclei seed markers through a modified simple one-pass superpixel segmentation method. Rather than using a single pixel as a seed, we created a superseed for each nucleus to involve more information for improved segmentation results. Nucleus pixels are extracted by a newly proposed fusing method to reduce stain variations and preserve nucleus contour information. By evaluating segmentation results, the proposed method was compared to five existing methods on a dataset with 52 immunohistochemically (IHC) stained images. Our proposed method produced the highest mean F1-score of 0.668. By evaluating the counting results, another dataset with more than 30 000 IHC stained nuclei in 88 images were prepared. The correlation between automatically generated nucleus counting results and manual nucleus counting results was up to R2 = 0.901 (P < 0.001). By evaluating segmentation results of proposed method-based tool, we tested on a 2018 Data Science Bowl (DSB) competition dataset, three users obtained DSB score of 0.331 ± 0.006.

The proposed method has been implemented as a plugin tool in ImageJ and the source code can be freely downloaded.

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.