An automatic mitosis detection method for breast cancer histopathology slide images based on objective and pixel-wise textural features classification

Study of histopathological cancerous tissue is one of the most reliable ways to grade various types of cancers. The result of grading helps the physicians to diagnose and prescribe suitable prognosis. The focus of this paper is on a CAD for automatic analysis of breast cancer histopathological Images to count mitosis as an important criteria for the breast cancer grading. To achieve this aim, sets of specific digital histopathological data are used which are captured by particular microscopic scanners named as Aperio XT and Hamamatsu NanoZoomer scanners. In the proposed method, these acquired images are employed and processed based on digital image processing approaches like 2-D anisotropic diffusion as a pre-process and morphological process. For extraction of pixel-wise features from predetermined mitotic regions, an statistical approach based on color information such as maximum likelihood estimation is employed. To prevent misclassification of mitosis and non-mitosis objects, an object-wise completed local binary pattern (CLBP) is proposed to extract texture features robust against rotation and color-level changes, and finally support vector machine (SVM) is used to classify the extracted feature vectors. Having computed the evaluation criteria, our proposed method performs better f-measure (70.94% for Aperio XT scanner images and 70.11% for Hamamatsu images) among the methods proposed by other participants at ICPR2012 Mitosis detection in breast cancer histopathological images.