Abstract
AimsOne of the main reliable histological features to suggest the diagnosis of inflammatory bowel disease is the presence of significant distortion of the crypt architecture indicating the chronic nature of the disease resulting in mucosal damage. This feature has a considerable intra-observer and inter-observer variability leading to significant subjectivity in colonic biopsy assessment. In this paper, we present a novel automated system to assess mucosal damage and architectural distortion in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).MethodsThe proposed system relies on advanced image understating and processing techniques to segment digitally acquired images of microscopic biopsies, then, to extract key features to quantify the crypts irregularities in shape and distribution. These features were used as inputs to an artificial intelligent classifier that, after a training phase, can carry out the assessment automatically.ResultsThe developed system was evaluated using 118 IBD biopsies. 116 out of 118 biopsies were correctly classified as compared to the consensus of three expert pathologists, achieving an overall precision of 98.31%.ConclusionsAn automated intelligent system to quantitatively assess inflammatory bowel disease was developed. The proposed system utilized advanced image understanding techniques together with an intelligent classifier to conduct the assessment. The developed system proved to be reliable, robust, and minimizes subjectivity and inter- and intra-observer variability.Virtual slidesThe virtual slide(s) for this article can be found here: http://www.diagnosticpathology.diagnomx.eu/vs/1797721309305023
Highlights
The diagnosis of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) has always been of great importance for the patient, treating physician, and pathologist
The segmented binary image is used to extract the key features; namely the Fourier Descriptors (FDs), Figure 6-c, and the Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) arcs calculated based on the adopted MST algorithm, Figure 6-d
The proposed system relies on advanced image understating and processing techniques to segment digitally acquired images of microscopic biopsies, to extract key features to quantify the crypts irregularities in shape and distribution
Summary
The diagnosis of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) has always been of great importance for the patient, treating physician, and pathologist. The histological features of IBD include both mucosal architectural abnormalities and inflammatory features The former is a more reliable reflection of chronicity and long standing injury and damage of the mucosa. In contrast to the normal colonic mucosa, which contains straight and tubular crypts extending to muscularis mucosa, the mucosa of IBD shows variable architectural abnormalities which are usually more prominent in UC. They include: irregular surface with pseudovillous changes, decreased crypt density and increased distance between crypts. Typical architectural features take several weeks to develop and maybe absent in the very early phase of IBD, [5]
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