Abstract
The antinuclear antibody (ANA) test is widely used for screening, diagnosing, and monitoring of autoimmune diseases. The most common methods to determine ANA are indirect immunofluorescence (IIF), performed by human epithelial type 2 (HEp-2) cells, as substrate antigen. The evaluation of ANA consist an analysis of fluorescence intensity and staining patterns. This paper presents a complete and fully automatic system able to characterize IIF images. The fluorescence intensity classification was obtained by performing an image preprocessing phase and implementing a Support Vector Machines (SVM) classifier. The cells identification problem has been addressed by developing a flexible segmentation methods, based on the Hough transform for ellipses, and on an active contours model. In order to classify the HEp-2 cells, six SVM and one k-nearest neighbors (KNN)classifiers were developed. The system was tested on a public database consisting of 2080 IIF images. Unlike almost all work presented on this topic, the proposed system automatically addresses all phases of the HEp-2 image analysis process. All results have been evaluated by comparing them with some of the most representative state-of-the-art work, demonstrating the goodness of the system in the characterization of HEp-2 images.
Highlights
Autoimmunity is the phenomenon for which the immune system activates its mechanisms towards molecules, cells, and structures of the same organism to which it belongs
The two parameters in the radial basis function (RBF) kernel, C and γ, were analyzed, in order to identify the optimal configuration for each implemented Support Vector Machines (SVM) classifier
92.9%, while with regard to the ability to identify the negatives, the system showed a specificity of images equal to 92.9%, while with regard to the ability to identify the negatives, the system showed a Sensitivity andSensitivity specificityand were analyzed by varying value, in thisvalue, way in thethis specificity of 70.5%
Summary
Autoimmunity is the phenomenon for which the immune system activates its mechanisms towards molecules, cells, and structures of the same organism to which it belongs. The diseases caused by this phenomenon, which are defined as “autoimmune”, are becoming increasingly widespread and include some of the most serious and penalizing conditions for the quality of life of those affected [1]. The diagnosis of autoimmune diseases is based on the finding of auto-antibodies, that is, antibodies directed against components of the same organism that produced them. Anti-nucleus antibodies (ANA) are a group of antibodies produced by the immune system that can mistakenly recognize the structures of the organism they belong to (autoantibodies). The ANA test identifies the presence of these autoantibodies in the blood. ANAs are the most recognized markers for
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