Staining methods routinely used in pathology lead to similar color distributions in the biologically different regions of histopathological images. This causes problems in image segmentation for the quantitative analysis and detection of cancer. To overcome this problem, unlike previous methods that use pixel distributions, we propose a new homogeneity measure based on the distributions of the objects that we define to represent tissue components. Using this measure, we demonstrate a new object-oriented segmentation algorithm. Working with colon biopsy images with similar color distributions in their heterogeneous regions, we show that this algorithm improves the segmentation accuracy compared to its pixel-based counterpart.

DATE: 5 May, 2008, Monday@ 15:40
PLACE: EA 409