Computer assisted cervical cytological nucleus localization

• Main Authors: Malviya, R., Karri, S. P. K., Chatterjee, J., Manjunatha, M., Ray, A. K.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Algorithm design and analysis; Cervical cancer; Clustering algorithms; Image color analysis; Image segmentation; Microscopy; minimum bounding rectangle; monolayer; necrotic background; neutrophils; region growing; screening
• ISSN: 2159-3442; 2159-3450
• DOI: 10.1109/TENCON.2012.6412344

Cervical cancer is the second most common form of malignancy among women in India. Regular screening of cervix can mollify its incidence thus enabling adoption of better prevention strategies. Proper localization and delineation of nuclear attributes for identification of crucial cellular features in Papanicolau stained cervical liquid based cytological images are tricky. Reduction of false negativity in the screening technique is the need of the hour. These ambiguities in the detection of nuclei are due to relative differences in staining intensity, presence of inflammatory cells, necrotic background, presence of bacteria, cellular overlapping causing super-imposition of nuclei, and clustering/clumping of cells etc. In this paper we present here a computationally lightweight yet elegant computer assisted automated technique for localization of epithelial cell nuclei in optical microscopic images of Pap stained monolayer cervical smears. The set of developed algorithms efficiently handle background separation and identification of nuclei in overlapping cells occurring as clusters. It uses morphological selection of region of interest preceded by intensity based object separation. The region of interest is iteratively bound using minimum bounding rectangles, to locate nuclei in the cell clusters. This method accurately inserts seed points, eliminates false seeds and detects nucleus. Thereafter region growing technique is applied considering obtained seed points to segment the nucleus from cells. It is inferred that most of the problems faced while locating nuclei are overcome with the above algorithm; the only cases when it fails is in presence of overlapping nuclei and in presence of overlapping neutrophils.