Automated cervical cell nuclei segmentation using morphological operation and watershed transformation

Nuclei segmentation of the epithelial cells of a Pap smear image is an important step in order to have correct morphometric measures. This task is non trivial due to the complexities of the Pap smear images. Our paper presents a novel method on nuclei segmentation using morphological operation and watershed transformation. The proposed segmentation method was evaluated with respect to its nuclei area and its shape-similarity in comparison to the pathologist truth. It showed that the segmentation results are promising and it can be used for further analysis such as cell quantification or abnormality cell detection.

[1]  Christophoros Nikou,et al.  Cell nuclei segmentation by learning a physically based deformable model , 2011, 2011 17th International Conference on Digital Signal Processing (DSP).

[2]  R. Richards-Kortum,et al.  Light scattering from cervical cells throughout neoplastic progression: influence of nuclear morphology, DNA content, and chromatin texture. , 2003, Journal of biomedical optics.

[3]  Izzati Muhimmah,et al.  Automatic Epithelial Cells Detection of Pap smears images using Fuzzy C-Means Clustering , 2022 .

[4]  E. Bak,et al.  Efficient segmentation framework of cell images in noise environments , 2004, The 26th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society.

[5]  Jagath C. Rajapakse,et al.  Segmentation of Clustered Nuclei With Shape Markers and Marking Function , 2009, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering.

[6]  T. W. Ridler,et al.  Picture thresholding using an iterative selection method. , 1978 .

[7]  Adrian N. Evans Morphological gradient operators for colour images , 2004, 2004 International Conference on Image Processing, 2004. ICIP '04..

[8]  Ehud Rivlin,et al.  Cell nuclei segmentation using fuzzy logic engine , 2004, 2004 International Conference on Image Processing, 2004. ICIP '04..

[9]  Izzati Muhimmah,et al.  Shape-based nuclei area of digitized pap smear images , 2012, Digital Image Processing.

[10]  Meng-Hsiun Tsai,et al.  Nucleus and cytoplast contour detector of cervical smear image , 2008, Pattern Recognit. Lett..

[11]  Pierre Soille,et al.  Morphological Image Analysis: Principles and Applications , 2003 .