Multi-cell nuclei segmentation in cervical cancer images by integrated feature vectors

Abstract

Automated analysis of cervical cancer images is considered as an attractive research in the biological fields. Due to the intensive advances in the digital technology and the light microscopy, the cellular imaging requires the continuous growing importance. Sophisticated methods are adopted to isolate the nuclei from the cytoplasm based on the boundary estimation and the analysis of intensity of blue cells to improve the abnormality prediction. The cell-based segmentation evolved in research studies assures the automatic assistance with an assumption of a single cell. Previous work [21] concentrates on the segmentation of abnormal region on single-cell images. This paper extends that work into the multi-cell images with the addition of geometrical features. The complex cell structure, poor contrast, and overlapping affect the cell segmentation performance. This paper enhances the performance of single-cell segmentation with the integrated feature vectors of geometrical (area, cell size, cell intensity and the maximum intensity) and Gray level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) to improve the abnormality level prediction.. Initially, the Neighborhood Concentric Filtering (NCF) is applied on the input slides to remove the noise present in the image and enhance the intensity level. Then, the initial level cluster formation and masking are performed on the noise-free image. The Optimal Weight Updating with the Multi-Level set (OWU-ML) estimates the Region of Interest (ROI) and segments the blue cell and cytoplasm. The clear analysis of blue cell indicates the exact classification of abnormal levels in the images. The combination of geometrical and GLCM extracts the texture pattern features of the blue cell, cytoplasm and the nucleus portions in the form of angle variations. Finally, the Neural Network-based RVM classifier predicts the classes of (normal and abnormal) cervical images. The integration of novel methods such as OWU-ML segmentation, GLCM + geometrical feature extraction and NN-RVM classification improves the abnormal prediction performance and assures the suitability in multi-cell cervical image handling in biological applications.