Influence of staining on fast automated cell segmentation, feature extraction and cell image analysis

FAZYTAN, a system for fast automated cell segmentation, cell image analysis and extraction of nuclear features, was used to analyze cervical cell images variously stained by the conventional Papanicolaou stain, the new Papanicolaou stain and hematoxylin and thionin only; the last two dyes are used as the nuclear stains in the two versions of the Papanicolaou stain. Other dyes were also tried in cell classification experiments. All cell images in the variously stained samples could be described by the same nuclear features as had been adapted for the discrimination of conventional-Papanicolaou-stained cells. Variances were lower for thionin-stained cells as compared with hematoxylin-stained cells. By application of spectrophotometry, it was confirmed that the spectra of the cytoplasmic counterstains are superimposed on those of the nuclear stains. It appears that a variety of dyes are suitable as cytologic stains for cell classification by the FAZYTAN system, provided that they achieve sufficiently strong nuclear-cytoplasmic contrast by precisely delineating the chromatin texture.