Segmentation of follicular regions on H&E slides using a matching filter and active contour model
Kamel Belkacem-Boussaid, Jeffrey W. Prescott, Gerard Lozanski, Metin N. Gürcan · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2010
Follicular Lymphoma (FL) accounts for 20-25% of non-Hodgkin lymphomas in the United States. The first step in follicular lymphoma grading is the identification of follicles. The goal of this paper is to develop a technique to segment follicular regions in H&E stained images. The method is based on a robust active contour model, which is initialized by a seed point selected inside the follicle manually by the user. The novel aspect of this method is the introduction of a matched filter for the flattening of background in the L channel of the Lab color space. The performance of the algorithm was tested by comparing it against the manual segmentations of trained readers using the Zijbendos similarity index. The mean accuracy of the final segmentation compared to the manual ground truth was 0.71 with a standard deviation of 0.12.