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10, OCTOBER 2010

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Computer-Aided Detection of Centroblasts for Follicular Lymphoma Grading Using Adaptive Likelihood-Based Cell Segmentation
Olcay Sertel*, Student Member, IEEE, Gerard Lozanski, Arwa Shanaah, and Metin N. Gurcan, Senior Member, IEEE

AbstractFollicular lymphoma (FL) is one of the most common lymphoid malignancies in the western world. FL has a variable clinical course, and important clinical treatment decisions for FL patients are based on histological grading, which is done by manually counting the large malignant cells called centroblasts (CB) in ten standard microscopic high-power elds from H&E-stained tissue sections. This method is tedious and subjective; as a result, suffers from considerable inter and intrareader variability even when used by expert pathologists. In this paper, we present a computer-aided detection system for automated identication of CB cells from H&E-stained FL tissue samples. The proposed system uses a unitone conversion to obtain a single-channel image that has the highest contrast. From the resulting image, which has a bimodal distribution due to the H&E stain, a cell-likelihood image is generated. Finally, a two-step CB detection procedure is applied. In the rst step, we identify evident nonCB cells based on size and shape. In the second step, the CB detection is further rened by learning and utilizing the texture distribution of nonCB cells. We evaluated the proposed approach on 100 region-of-interest images extracted from ten distinct tissue samples and obtained a promising 80.7% detection accuracy. Index TermsBiomedical image analysis, cell segmentation, follicular lymphoma (FL), H&E-stained tissue, histology.

Fig. 1. Sample region-of-interest images (512 512 pixels) from H&Estained FL tissue samples viewed at 40 magnication. CB cells are identied by ve different pathologists indicated by circles in different colors.

I. INTRODUCTION

HE LAST few years witnessed a remarkable increase in research studies on digital pathology applications. This is mostly due to the recent advances in high-throughput wholeslide tissue scanning technology. Image analysis can now be utilized to evaluate tissue samples as a second reader in order to supplement the decision-making mechanism. However, there

Manuscript received April 22, 2010; revised June 4, 2010; accepted June 10, 2010. Date of publication June 28, 2010; date of current version September 15, 2010. This work was supported in part by Award R01CA134451 from the National Cancer Institute. Asterisk indicates corresponding author. *O. Sertel is with the Departments of Biomedical Informatics and Electrical and Computer Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210 USA (e-mail: osertel@bmi.osu.edu). G. Lozanski and A. Shanaah are with the Department of Pathology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210 USA (e-mail: Gerard.Lozanski@osumc.edu; Arwa.Shanaah@osumc.edu). M. N. Gurcan is with the Department of Biomedical Informatics, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210 USA (e-mail: Metin.Gurcan@osumc.edu). Color versions of one or more of the gures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TBME.2010.2055058

are challenging problems that need to be addressed before these systems can be reliably utilized in practice. These problems include: cellular architecture variations, image noise, artifacts, and distortions due to tissue xation, slide preparation, and staining processes. To deal with these challenges, we need to develop adaptive approaches. Follicular lymphoma (FL) is one of the most common lymphoid malignancies in the western world with a highly variable clinical course [1]. Currently, the clinical decisions are guided by histological grading of the tumor. Recommended by the World Health Organization, histological grading of FL is based on the average number of cancerous cells, namely, centroblasts (CBs), per standard 40 microscopic high-power eld in representative malignant follicles. However, visual qualitative assessment is difcult, time consuming, and subject to high inter- and intrareader variability [2]. Fig. 1 shows sample regionof-interest (ROI) image regions captured from different tissue samples and the interreader variability between ve different pathologists. Promising image-analysis systems have been proposed in the last few years to classify tissue subtypes associated with various grades of cancer [3], [4]. One of the problems is the segmentation of distinct cytological components. Due to the inherent discrimination provided by the staining, robust feature space analysis techniques (e.g., k-means, expectation maximization) in the color space is successfully applied in recent approaches [5], [6]. Statistical texture operators based on cooccurrence and run-length matrices have been applied to achieve tissue classication [7]. There are also applications that target the detection of cells rather than global-scene segmentation. In [8], a concavity-based ellipse-tting method has been proposed, whereas in [9], a supervised classication approach is

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Fig. 2.

Block diagram of the proposed CB detection system.

utilized that requires considerable amount of preprocessing to avoid staining variations. II. IDENTIFICATION OF CENTROBLASTS USING IMAGE ANALYSIS Fig. 2 shows the owchart of the proposed image-analysis system, which mainly consists of three stages: segmentation of cellular components, identifying individual cells, and CB detection. A. Segmentation of Cellular Components H&E-stain colors nuclear and cytoplasmic regions to hues of blue and purple while protein-rich collagen structures such as extracellular material is colored into hues of pink. As can be seen from the images given in Fig. 1, due to the application of chemical dyes, these images have a considerably limited dynamic range in the color spectrum. We rst convert the input images in the RGB color space onto a 1-D unitone image using the principal components analysis (PCA) [10]. The unitone image is computed by projecting the RGB image onto the rst principle component associated with the highest variance; hence, the resulting unitone image has the highest contrast. We further normalize the unitone image to the [0,1] range. The next step is the segmentation of individual cells. Modeling the distribution of both cellular and extracellular components with a Gaussian mixture model, we estimate the mixture parameters using the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm [10]. The unknown parameters are = {H , H and E , E }, where H , H and E , E are the mean and variance of the distributions associated with cellular and extracellular structures, respectively. The EM is an iterative method, which starts with a random initialization. It consists of two steps: expectation (1), which computes the likelihood with respect to the current estimates and maximization (2), which maximizes the expected log likelihood Q(|(t) ) = EZ |x, ( t ) (log L(; x, Z)) (t+1) = arg max Q(|(t) )

Fig. 3. (a) Sample ROI image of 300300 pixels converted to unitone, and (b)(e) the subsequent intermediate results showing the progress at different steps of CB detection process. (f) Final CB detection result is given together with the ground-truth CB markings by different pathologists indicated circles with different colors.

underlying distributions are estimated, we compute the posterior probability for each pixel as follows: p(i |x) = p(x|i )P (i ) j p(x|j )P (j ) (3)

where i = {c, ec} indicate cellular or extracellular components, and p(x|i ) is normally distributed as p(x|i ) N (i , i ). Fig. 3(a) and (b) shows a sample unitone-converted image and its histogram with estimated distributions of cellular and extracellular components overlaid, respectively. B. Identifying Individual Cells Using the posterior probabilities and the estimated parameters of the unitone values, we construct a cellular-likelihood image. We use a sigmoid function (see Fig. 3), which can be controlled with two parameters as follows: fCell
LK (x)

1 1+ e (x )

(4)

(1) (2)

where controls the smoothness of the s-shaped likelihood curve and indicates the offset where fCell LK () = 0.5. These parameters are tuned adaptively for each image such that = H + 2 H and = 50(E H ), where H , H are the estimated parameters of the distribution of the unitone values associated with cellular components, and (E H ) is proportional to how well these distributions are separated from each other. After constructing the cellular likelihood, we apply a locally adaptive thresholding step to obtain the binary representation of cellular structures such that the threshold value is computed differently for each pixel based on the distribution of likelihood values within its neighborhood as follows: 1 (p, q) = 2 NW
N w /2 N w /2

ICellLK (i, j)
i=N w /2 j =N w /2

(5)

where x = {x1 , . . . , xn } are the observations (i.e., the pixel values) and Z = {z1 , z2 } are the latent variables that determine the component from which the observation originates. Once the

where p, q are the row and column indices, i, j are the offset indices within the local neighborhood, and NW = 15 denes

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C. CB Detection In the FL tissue, the malignant follicles are composed of varying proportions of centrocytes, small often cleaved cells with coarse chromatin and scant cytoplasm and CBs, large cells with open vesicular chromatin and one to multiple nucleoli that are frequently associated with nuclear membrane. In low-grade FL, centrocytes predominate while in high-grade FL, CBs increase in number. Apart from the differences in size and shape, due to the complex spatial organization of subcellular components, cell texture provides an important perceptual clue that allows us to differentiate CBs from the centrocytes. After the segmentation of individual cells, we use a two-step procedure to identify CBs. The rst step is based on eliminating evident nonCB cells using the size and eccentricity criterion as follows: celli = CB, ai > a + a and ei < 0.85 not CB, otherwise (7)

Fig. 4. Sample image region demonstrating cell segmentation and the resulting cluster of cells. (a) Unitone image. (b) Cell likelihood. (c) Cell cluster.

Fig. 5. (a)(d) show the resulting voting spaces for a range of radii, r = {19,15,11,7}; (e)(h) show the corresponding locations (green circles) of segmented individual cells with varying radii.

the neighborhood window size and ICellLK is the cell-likelihood image [see Fig. 3(c) and (d)]. One of the generic problems in microscopic image-analysis applications is the separation of spatially clustered cells that are touching or even overlapping each other. The watershed transform based on shape topology is a common approach to deal with this problem [11]. However, it is not suitable in cases where more than a few cells are clustered. Using the fast radialsymmetry transform [12], we propose a spatial voting-based approach. Accordingly, for a radius value of r, each pixel p contributes a spatial voting matrix proportional to its gradient magnitude g(p) at the spatial location sr (p). sr (p) is calculated based on the gradient direction sr (p) = sr (p) + round g(p) r g(p) (6)

where g(p) is the gradient of pixel p and sr denotes the spatial voting matrix computed for the radius value r. We compute the radial symmetry votes for a range of radii values r = {7, 9, . . . , 21} that covers the typical range of cell sizes. The corresponding voting spaces for different radii values are merged based on the maximum vote. Finally, we compute local maxima locations associated with individual cells. Fig. 4 shows a sample image region, its cell-likelihood image, and the binary segmentation of cells after locally adaptive thresholding. As can be seen from Fig. 4(c), a group of touching cells is identied as a single component. Fig. 5 shows the cell separation using the radialsymmetry-based voting approach.

where ai is the area and ei is the eccentricity of ith cell dened as the ratio of the major to minor axis length of best tted ellipse. a and a are mean and standard deviation of cell area, respectively. As we designed this initial CB detection step to be very sensitive, it provides a relatively high number of false positives (FPs). However, we can still identify evident nonCB cells and utilize their texture distributions in order to further rene our detection in the subsequent step. We use the gray-level run length matrix (GLRLM) method to obtain a statistical measure of the spatial organization of intensity variations within each cell. The GLRLM is a 2-D matrix from which higher order statistics can be derived to represent image texture [13]. From the GLRLM representation with a 16 gray-level quantization, we compute ten features averaged over four different directions = {0, /4, /2, 3/4}. These features cover a wide spectrum of patterns of different scales and texture information. Using GLRLM features, each cell is represented as a vector in the resulting feature space. Then, we model the distribution of nonCB cells identied in the initial detection step as a Gaussian distribution (i.e., N (non CB , non CB )). Fig. 6 shows the scatter plot of GLRLM texture features in a 2-D feature space obtained by applying PCA and keeping the rst two dimensions associated with the largest variance, as well as the estimated distribution of nonCB cells plotted in elliptical contours associated with 0.5, 1, 2, and 3, respectively. As can be seen in Fig. 6, initially detected CB cells have unique texture features clustered densely, while the features of nonCB cells clearly diverge from this dense cluster. Based on this observation, we identify CBs as follows: P (fi |not CB , not CB ) CB, > P (not CB + 3U 1/2 ) (8) fi = not CB, otherwise where P (not CB + 3U 1/2 ) corresponds to the likelihood value computed as the value at the iso-contour of N (not CB , not CB ), where covariance matrix can be decomposed into equidensity contours, i.e., iso-contours, using the

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TABLE I EVALUATION OF THE PROPOSED CB DETECTION SYSTEM

Fig. 6. Scatter plot of cell texture features. CB and nonCB cells are dened based on the initial detection using the size and shape information, and further rened based on estimated distribution P (f | n o t C B ) of nonCB cells.

eigenvalue decomposition = U U T and 1/2 corresponds to semimajor axis lengths of the associated iso-contours. III. EXPERIMENTAL EVALUATION We evaluated the proposed approach over a dataset consisting of 100 ROI images from ten different whole-slide FL tissue samples digitized at 40 magnication using an Aperio Scope XT scanner (Aperio, San Diego, CA). Each ROI image has a digital resolution of 1353 2168 pixels and includes approximately 2500 cells. The ground-truth information for the CB cell locations is generated by ve expert board-certied hematopathologists. Since there is a considerable amount of variation between different readers, we construct the groundtruth from CBs that are marked by at least two pathologists. Based on this ground-truth, the average CB detection accuracy of an expert hematopathologist is 65% with 5.1 FP CBs per ROI image on average. Table I summarizes the evaluation of the proposed computerized CB detection system. For each tissue slide, we report the average CB detection count per ground-truth CB count (CB), average CB detection accuracy (Acc), and the FP detection count, at the initial and the nal CB detection stages, respectively. As can be seen from these results, the initial CB detection step provides 90% accuracy with an average FP count of 200. In the nal renement stage, the FP count is reduced by 85% down to 30 FPs per ROI image on average, compromising roughly 10% accuracy in CB detection accuracy. The results show that the accuracy of the computerized system is outperforming the accuracy of human readers. However, it generates a relatively higher number of FPs (30/ROI). IV. CONCLUSION The proposed system demonstrates the feasibility of robust segmentation of individual cells in the tissue image by a novel adaptive likelihood approach based on both global and local image characteristics. The CB detection is carried out in a two-step procedure where we rst identify evident nonCB cells based on the size and shape constraints, and then model their distribution

in the feature space to rene the nal CB detection step. Experimental results provide promising performance of this system, which can supplement the decision-making mechanism in order to improve current agreement among different human readers. In our future work, we will develop complementary approaches to improve the current performance of the proposed approach. ACKNOWLEDGMENT The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the ofcial views of the National Cancer Institute or the National Institutes of Health. REFERENCES
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