Novel edge detection method for nuclei segmentation of liver cancer histopathology images

Abstract

In automatic cancer detection, nuclei segmentation is a very essential step which enables the classification task simpler and computationally more efficient. However, automatic nuclei detection is fraught with the problems of inter-class variability of nuclei size and shapes. In this research article, a novel unsupervised edge detection technique, is proposed for segmenting the nuclei regions in liver cancer Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) stained histopathology images. In this novel edge detection technique, the notion of computing local standard deviation is incorporated, instead of computing gradients. Since, local standard deviation value is correlated with the edge information of image, this novel method can extract the nuclei edges efficiently, even at multiscale. The edge-detected image is further converted into a binary image by employing Ostu (IEEE Trans Syst Man Cybern 9(1):62–66, 1979)’s thresholding operation. Subsequently, an adaptive morphological filter is also employed in order to refine the final segmented image. The proposed nuclei segmentation method is also tested on a well-recognized multi-organ dataset, in order to check its effectiveness over wide variety of dataset. The visual results of both datasets indicate that the proposed segmentation method overcomes the limitations of existing unsupervised methods, moreover, its performance is comparable with the same of recent deep neural models like DIST, HoverNet, etc. Furthermore, three quality metrics are computed in order to measure the performance of several nuclei segmentation methods quantitatively. The mean value of quality metrics reveals that proposed segmentation method indeed outperformed other existing nuclei segmentation methods.