Automatic Classification of Lymphoma Images With Transform-Based Global Features

Abstract

We propose a report on automatic classification of three common types of malignant lymphoma: chronic lymphocytic leukemia, follicular lymphoma, and mantle cell lymphoma. The goal was to find patterns indicative of lymphoma malignancies and allowing classifying these malignancies by type. We used a computer vision approach for quantitative characterization of image content. A unique two-stage approach was employed in this study. At the outer level, raw pixels were transformed with a set of transforms into spectral planes. Simple (Fourier, Chebyshev, and wavelets) and compound transforms (Chebyshev of Fourier and wavelets of Fourier) were computed. Raw pixels and spectral planes were then routed to the second stage (the inner level). At the inner level, the set of multipurpose global features was computed on each spectral plane by the same feature bank. All computed features were fused into a single feature vector. The specimens were stained with hematoxylin (H) and eosin (E) stains. Several color spaces were used: RGB, gray, CIE-L*a*b*, and also the specific stain-attributed H&E space, and experiments on image classification were carried out for these sets. The best signal (98%-99% on earlier unseen images) was found for the HE, H, and E channels of the H&E data set.