Morphological analysis of mammary biopsy images
Elisa Martinez Marroquin, Eugènia Santamaría, Xavier Jove, Joan Claudi Socoró · 2002
The authors present an automatic system to analyse a cell nucleus in a given biopsy of mammary tissue which is cancerous. Identification and characterization of the cell nucleus provides enough information to diagnose a high or low grade cancer. This is a high interest differentiation for the pathologist to apply the correct therapy. Performing these measures by human observation is a hard, imprecise and subjective task. The algorithm they present processes the image in order to identify the cell nucleus over the rest of the tissue. Images are enhanced and segmented using morphological transformations. An ultimate erosion is used in two steps to separate cell nuclei in contact. It is based in a combination of symmetrical ultimate erosion with directional ultimate erosion.