Assessment of algorithms for mitosis detection in breast cancer histopathology images

The proliferative activity of breast tumors, which is routinely estimated by counting of mitotic figures in hematoxylin and eosin stained histology sections, is considered to be one of the most important prognostic markers. However, mitosis counting is laborious, subjective and may suffer from low inter-observer agreement. With the wider acceptance of whole slide images in pathology labs, automatic image analysis has been proposed as a potential solution for these issues. In this paper, the results from the Assessment of Mitosis Detection Algorithms 2013 (AMIDA13) challenge are described. The challenge was based on a data set consisting of 12 training and 11 testing subjects, with more than one thousand annotated mitotic figures by multiple observers. Short descriptions and results from the evaluation of eleven methods are presented. The top performing method has an error rate that is comparable to the inter-observer agreement among pathologists

Added benefits of computer-assisted analysis of Hematoxylin-Eosin stained breast histopathological digital slides

This thesis aims at determining if computer-assisted analysis can be used to better understand pathologists’ perception of mitotic figures on Hematoxylin-Eosin (HE) stained breast histopathological digital slides. It also explores the feasibility of reproducible histologic nuclear atypia scoring by incorporating computer-assisted analysis to cytological scores given by a pathologist. In addition, this thesis investigates the possibility of computer-assisted diagnosis for categorizing HE breast images into different subtypes of cancer or benign masses. In the first study, a data set of 453 mitoses and 265 miscounted non-mitoses within breast cancer digital slides were considered. Different features were extracted from the objects in different channels of eight colour spaces. The findings from the first research study suggested that computer-aided image analysis can provide a better understanding of image-related features related to discrepancies among pathologists in recognition of mitoses. Two tasks done routinely by the pathologists are making diagnosis and grading the breast cancer. In the second study, a new tool for reproducible nuclear atypia scoring in breast cancer histological images was proposed. The third study proposed and tested MuDeRN (MUlti-category classification of breast histopathological image using DEep Residual Networks), which is a framework for classifying hematoxylin-eosin stained breast digital slides either as benign or cancer, and then categorizing cancer and benign cases into four different subtypes each. The studies indicated that computer-assisted analysis can aid in both nuclear grading (COMPASS) and breast cancer diagnosis (MuDeRN). The results could be used to improve current status of breast cancer prognosis estimation through reducing the inter-pathologist disagreement in counting mitotic figures and reproducible nuclear grading. It can also improve providing a second opinion to the pathologist for making a diagnosis

Detecting mitotic figures in breast cancer histopathology images

The scoring of mitotic figures is an integrated part of the Bloom and Richardson system for grading of invasive breast cancer. It is routinely done by pathologists by visual examination of hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) stained histology slides on a standard light microscope. As such, it is a tedious process prone to inter- and intra-observer variability. In the last decade, whole-slide imaging (WSI) has emerged as the "digital age" alternative to the classical microscope. The increasing acceptance of WSI in pathology labs has brought an interest in the application of automatic image analysis methods, with the goal of reducing or completely eliminating manual input to the analysis. In this paper, we present a method for automatic detection of mitotic figures in breast cancer histopathology images. The proposed method consists of two main components: candidate extraction and candidate classification. Candidate objects are extracted by image segmentation with the Chan-Vese level set method. The candidate classification component aims at classifying all extracted candidates as being a mitotic figure or a false object. A statistical classifier is trained with a number of features that describe the size, shape, color and texture of the candidate objects. The proposed detection procedure was developed using a set of 18 whole-slide images, with over 900 manually annotated mitotic figures, split into independent training and testing sets. The overall true positive rate on the testing set was 59.5% while achieving 4.2 false positives per one high power field (HPF). © 2013 SPIE

Detecting mitotic figures in breast cancer histopathology images

The scoring of mitotic figures is an integrated part of the Bloom and Richardson system for grading of invasive breast cancer. It is routinely done by pathologists by visual examination of hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) stained histology slides on a standard light microscope. As such, it is a tedious process prone to inter- and intra-observer variability. In the last decade, whole-slide imaging (WSI) has emerged as the digital age alternative to the classical microscope. The increasing acceptance of WSI in pathology labs has brought an interest in the application of automatic image analysis methods, with the goal of reducing or completely eliminating manual input to the analysis. In this paper, we present a method for automatic detection of mitotic figures in breast cancer histopathology images. The proposed method consists of two main components: candidate extraction and candidate classification. Candidate objects are extracted by image segmentation with the Chan-Vese level set method. The candidate classification component aims at classifying all extracted candidates as being a mitotic figure or a false object. A statistical classifier is trained with a number of features that describe the size, shape, color and texture of the candidate objects. The proposed detection procedure was developed using a set of 18 whole-slide images, with over 900 manually annotated mitotic figures, split into independent training and testing sets. The overall true positive rate on the testing set was 59.5% while achieving 4.2 false positives per one high power field (HPF). © 2013 SPIE

Detecting mitotic figures in breast cancer histopathology images

The scoring of mitotic figures is an integrated part of the Bloom and Richardson system for grading of invasive breast cancer. It is routinely done by pathologists by visual examination of hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) stained histology slides on a standard light microscope. As such, it is a tedious process prone to inter- and intra-observer variability. In the last decade, whole-slide imaging (WSI) has emerged as the "digital age" alternative to the classical microscope. The increasing acceptance of WSI in pathology labs has brought an interest in the application of automatic image analysis methods, with the goal of reducing or completely eliminating manual input to the analysis. In this paper, we present a method for automatic detection of mitotic figures in breast cancer histopathology images. The proposed method consists of two main components: candidate extraction and candidate classification. Candidate objects are extracted by image segmentation with the Chan-Vese level set method. The candidate classification component aims at classifying all extracted candidates as being a mitotic figure or a false object. A statistical classifier is trained with a number of features that describe the size, shape, color and texture of the candidate objects. The proposed detection procedure was developed using a set of 18 whole-slide images, with over 900 manually annotated mitotic figures, split into independent training and testing sets. The overall true positive rate on the testing set was 59.5% while achieving 4.2 false positives per one high power field (HPF). © 2013 SPIE