Segmentation of cell nuclei within chained structures in microscopic images of colon sections

In this paper we focus on the segmentation problem of specific chained configurations in images taken from colon tissues. The proposed technique uses a priori information about the general structure and the relationship between epithelial cells nuclei and encapsulates the human behaviour on the critical regions between nuclei. After the background detection is performed, the points with high concavity from the boundaries of the nuclei structures are detected. A set of templates and rules are established by analysing the inter-nuclei regions. These rules are used to validate and to pair the concave points so that their connecting lines to indicate the separation regions between nuclei. The evaluation of the proposed method is made with precision, recall and accuracy measures.

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