TITLE:
Segmentation of Sinusoids in Hematoxylin and Eosin Stained Liver Specimens Using an Orientation-Selective Filter
AUTHORS:
Masahiro Ishikawa, Sercan Taha Ahi, Fumikazu Kimura, Masahiro Yamaguchi, Hiroshi Nagahashi, Akinori Hashiguchi, Michiie Sakamoto
KEYWORDS:
Histopathological Tissue Images; Orientation-Selective Filter; Segmentation of Sinusoids
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Medical Imaging,
Vol.3 No.4,
December
20,
2013
ABSTRACT: The liver comprises cell layers of hepatocytes called trabeculae,
which are separated by vascular sinusoids. Under- standing the
structure of hepatic trabeculae and liver sinusoids in hematoxylin and eosin
(HE)-stained liver specimens is important for the differential diagnosis of
liver diseases. In this study, we develop an approach to extracting liver
sinusoids from HE-stained images. The proposed approach involves: 1) a
new orientation-selective filter (OS filter) for edge enhancement and image
denoising, 2) the clustering of image pixels to identify candidate sinusoids,
and 3) a classification procedure that discards unlikely candidates and selects
the final sinusoid areas. Experimental studies using a database of 16 images
with a resolution of 512 × 512 pixels showed that the proposed approach could
segment liver sinusoid pixels with 81% of specificity and
94% of sensitivity. A comparison with a method based on bilateral filters
showed that this method improved the sensitivity for all images with an average
improvement of 4% and no difference in specificity. The results were presented
to a group of pathologists and they confirmed that the images were highly
representative of the tissue morphology features.