P53immunostained cell nuclei segmentation in tissue images of oral squamous cell carcinoma

Abstract

This paper presents segmentation of p53immunostained tissue images of oral squamous cell carcinoma that consist of cell nuclei segmentation and splitting of overlapping/touching cell structures. In segmentation, the entropy thresholding has been adopted in which the optimum threshold value to each color component of the image is obtained by maximizing the global entropy computed from its gray-level co-occurrence matrix. The segmented image consists of isolated cells and complex nuclei structures. A novel complex nuclei structure detection algorithm is proposed to identify overlapped nuclei structures, which have been further resolved by watershed transform. The performance of the segmentation technique is evaluated using the quantitative metrics, namely mean absolute difference (MAD), dice coefficient (DC) and accuracy. Global entropy thresholding-based segmentation technique achieved the best MAD of 0.478, DC of 0.967 and accuracy of 0.970 compared to state-of-art techniques such as otsu and active contour. Extensive experimental results show that proposed complex nuclei structure detection-based overlapping/touching cells splitting algorithm effectively delineated nuclei with over- and under-segmentation rate of 0.49 %. Therefore, tissue image segmentation method presented has high potential in immunohistochemical (IHC) quantification and also can be easily generalized for images stained with other biomarkers.