Histopathological image analysis : a review

Over the past decade, dramatic increases in computational power and improvement in image analysis algorithms have allowed the development of powerful computer-assisted analytical approaches to radiological data. With the recent advent of whole slide digital scanners, tissue histopathology slides can now be digitized and stored in digital image form. Consequently, digitized tissue histopathology has now become amenable to the application of computerized image analysis and machine learning techniques. Analogous to the role of computer-assisted diagnosis (CAD) algorithms in medical imaging to complement the opinion of a radiologist, CAD algorithms have begun to be developed for disease detection, diagnosis, and prognosis prediction to complement the opinion of the pathologist. In this paper, we review the recent state of the art CAD technology for digitized histopathology. This paper also briefly describes the development and application of novel image analysis technology for a few specific histopathology related problems being pursued in the United States and Europe

Identification of Topological Features in Renal Tumor Microenvironment Associated with Patient Survival

Motivation As a highly heterogeneous disease, the progression of tumor is not only achieved by unlimited growth of the tumor cells, but also supported, stimulated, and nurtured by the microenvironment around it. However, traditional qualitative and/or semi-quantitative parameters obtained by pathologist’s visual examination have very limited capability to capture this interaction between tumor and its microenvironment. With the advent of digital pathology, computerized image analysis may provide a better tumor characterization and give new insights into this problem. Results We propose a novel bioimage informatics pipeline for automatically characterizing the topological organization of different cell patterns in the tumor microenvironment. We apply this pipeline to the only publicly available large histopathology image dataset for a cohort of 190 patients with papillary renal cell carcinoma obtained from The Cancer Genome Atlas project. Experimental results show that the proposed topological features can successfully stratify early- and middle-stage patients with distinct survival, and show superior performance to traditional clinical features and cellular morphological and intensity features. The proposed features not only provide new insights into the topological organizations of cancers, but also can be integrated with genomic data in future studies to develop new integrative biomarkers

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

Classification and Retrieval of Digital Pathology Scans: A New Dataset

In this paper, we introduce a new dataset, \textbf{Kimia Path24}, for image classification and retrieval in digital pathology. We use the whole scan images of 24 different tissue textures to generate 1,325 test patches of size 1000$\times$1000 (0.5mm$\times$0.5mm). Training data can be generated according to preferences of algorithm designer and can range from approximately 27,000 to over 50,000 patches if the preset parameters are adopted. We propose a compound patch-and-scan accuracy measurement that makes achieving high accuracies quite challenging. In addition, we set the benchmarking line by applying LBP, dictionary approach and convolutional neural nets (CNNs) and report their results. The highest accuracy was 41.80\% for CNN.Comment: Accepted for presentation at Workshop for Computer Vision for Microscopy Image Analysis (CVMI 2017) @ CVPR 2017, Honolulu, Hawai