A robust method for nuclei segmentation of HE stained histopathology images

Abstract

Segmentation of histopathology images is an initial and vital step for image understanding. To increase the throughput and to maintain high accuracy, we have to go for an automatic image segmentation method. Here, a robust method for segmentation of cell nuclei in Hematoxylin and Eosin (HE) stained histopathology images is proposed. The proposed segmentation step consists of an initial pre-processing step containing adaptive colour de-convolution and a succession of morphological operations, followed by multilevel thresholding and post-processing steps. Minimum region size is the one parameter which is necessary for this method and set according to the resolution of histopathology image. The proposed nuclei segmentation method does not require any assumptions or prior information about cell morphology. Hence, proposed method applies to the analysis of a wide range of tissues such as liver, kidney, breast, gastric mucosa, and bone marrow and HE stained liver histopathology images from the Hospital. Results yield that proposed nuclei segmentation provides better results in terms of quantitatively and qualitatively on two datasets. © 2020 IEEE.