Automatic detection of malignant prostatic gland units in cross-sectional microscopic images

Prostate cancer is the second most frequent cause of cancer deaths among men in the US. In the most reliable screening method, histological images from a biopsy are examined under a microscope by pathologists. In an early stage of prostate cancer, only relatively few gland units in a large region become malignant. Discovering such sparse malignant gland units using a microscope is a labor-intensive and error-prone task for pathologists. In this paper, we develop effective image segmentation and classification methods for automatic detection of malignant gland units in microscopic images. Both segmentation and classification methods are based on carefully designed feature descriptors, including color histograms and texton co-occurrence tables.