MICCAI 2013 - LNCS 8149-8151

Separation of Benign and Malignant Glands in Prostatic Adenocarcinoma

Sabrina Rashid¹, Ladan Fazli², Alexander Boag³, Robert Siemens³, Purang Abolmaesumi¹, and Septimiu E. Salcudean¹

¹Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

²The Vancouver Prostate Center, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

³Kingston General Hospital, Kingston, ON, Canada

Abstract. This paper presents an analysis of the high resolution histo-pathology images of the prostate with a focus on the evolution of morphological gland features in prostatic adenocarcinoma. Here we propose a novel technique of labeling individual glands as malignant or benign. In the first step, the gland and nuclei objects of the images are automatically segmented. Individual gland units are segmented out by consolidating their lumina with the surrounding layers of epithelium and nuclei. The nuclei objects are segmented by using a marker controlled watershed algorithm. Two new features, Number of Nuclei Layer (N_NL) and Ratio of Epithelial layer area to Lumen area (R_EL) have been extracted from the segmented units. The main advantage of this approach is that it can detect individual malignant gland units, irrespective of neighboring histology and/or the spatial extent of the cancer. The proposed algorithm has been tested on 40 histopathology scenes taken from 10 high resolution whole mount images and achieved a sensitivity of 0.83 and specificity of 0.81 in a leave-75%-out cross-validation.

Keywords: Nuclei layer, epithelial layer, prostatic adenocarcinoma

LNCS 8151, p. 461 ff.

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