A hybrid approach for oestrogen receptor status evaluation
Mohamed Ali Cherni, Mounir Sayadi, Karima Mrad, Farhat Fnaiech · The Imaging Science Journal · 2012
AbstractThe aim of this work is to assist pathologists in the evaluation of tumour cells in microscopic breast images where we distinguish three kinds of cells: positive tumour cells for oestrogen receptor, negative tumour cells for oestrogen receptor, and non-tumour cells. This work has proven to be very difficult because of the variability of cells’ size, shape (morphology) and distribution. Conventional methods for segmentation like thresholding and edge detection are unable to resolve this problem. The herein proposed method is a hybrid approach combining segmentation and classification to ensure better results. While the morphological processes are used for artefact elimination and cell segmentation, the classification algorithm is used to automatically classify all existing cells in the image. The paper contains also a comparative study between fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm and neural network-based classification. The proposed approach was applied on several microscopic breast cancer cells imag...