HEp-2 Cell Classification Research Articles

HEp-2 cell classification using rotation invariant co-occurrence among local binary patterns

This paper proposes a novel method for classifying six categories of patterns of fluorescence staining of a HEp-2 cell. The proposed method is constructed as a combination of the powerful rotation invariant co-occurrence among adjacent local binary pattern (RIC-LBP) image feature and a linear support vector machine (SVM). RIC-LBP provides high descriptive ability and robustness against local rotations of an input cell image. To further deal with global rotation, we synthesize many training images by rotating the original training images and constructing the SVM using both the original and synthesized images. The proposed method has the following advantages: (1) robustness against uniform changes in intensity of an input cell image, (2) invariance under local and global rotation of the image, (3) low computational cost, and (4) easy implementation. The proposed method was demonstrated to be effective through evaluation experiments using the MIVIA HEp-2 images dataset and comparison with typical state-of-the-art methods.

HEp-2 cells classification via sparse representation of textural features fused into dissimilarity space

Autoimmune diseases are proven to be connected with the occurrence of autoantibodies in patient serum. Antinuclear autoantibodies (ANAs) identification can be accomplished in a laboratory using indirect immunofluorescence (IIF) imaging. In this paper a system for automatic classification of staining patterns on HEp-2 fluorescence images is proposed. Our method utilizes two descriptors in order to encode gradient and textural characteristics of the depicted patterns. Along with distribution of SIFT features, we propose the new GoC-LBP descriptor based on co-occurrences of uniform Local Binary Patterns along directions dictated by the orientation of local gradient. At a second stage, the descriptors are fused while creating a dissimilarity representation of an image. A powerful classification scheme is incorporated, utilizing a discriminative sparse representation-based scheme for the classification. Experiments were conducted using a publicly available dataset, comparing the obtained performance to recently reported results of a relevant contest, demonstrating the effectives of the proposed method.

Efficient k-NN based HEp-2 cells classifier

Human Epithelial (HEp-2) cells are commonly used in the Indirect Immunofluorescence (IIF) tests to detect autoimmune diseases. The diagnosis consists of searching and classification to specific patterns created by Anti-Nuclear Antibodies (ANAs) in the patient serum. Evaluation of the IIF test is mostly done by humans, which means that it is highly dependent on the experience and expertise of the physician. Therefore, a significant amount of research has been focused on the development of computer aided diagnostic systems which could help with the analysis of images from microscopes. This work deals with the design and development of HEp-2 cells classifier. The classifier is able to categorize pre-segmented images of HEp-2 cells into 6 classes. The core of this engine consists of the following image descriptors: Haralick features, Local Binary Patterns, SIFT, surface description and a granulometry-based descriptor. These descriptors produce vectors that form metric spaces. k-NN classification is based on aggregated distance function which combines several features together. An extensive set of evaluations was performed on the publicly available MIVIA HEp-2 images dataset which allows a direct comparison of our approach with other solutions. The results show that our approach is one of the leading classifiers when comparing with other participants in the HEp-2 Cells Classification Contest[1].

Benchmarking HEp-2 Cells Classification Methods

In this paper, we report on the first edition of the HEp-2 Cells Classification contest, held at the 2012 edition of the International Conference on Pattern Recognition, and focused on indirect immunofluorescence (IIF) image analysis. The IIF methodology is used to detect autoimmune diseases by searching for antibodies in the patient serum but, unfortunately, it is still a subjective method that depends too heavily on the experience and expertise of the physician. This has been the motivation behind the recent initial developments of computer aided diagnosis systems in this field. The contest aimed to bring together researchers interested in the performance evaluation of algorithms for IIF image analysis: 28 different recognition systems able to automatically recognize the staining pattern of cells within IIF images were tested on the same undisclosed dataset. In particular, the dataset takes into account the six staining patterns that occur most frequently in the daily diagnostic practice: centromere, nucleolar, homogeneous, fine speckled, coarse speckled, and cytoplasmic. In the paper, we briefly describe all the submitted methods, analyze the obtained results, and discuss the design choices conditioning the performance of each method.