Color edges extraction using statistical features and automatic threshold technique: application to the breast cancer cells

BACKGROUND: Color image segmentation has been so far applied in many areas; hence, recently many different techniques have been developed and proposed. In the medical imaging area, the image segmentation may be helpful to provide assistance to doctor in order to follow-up the disease of a certain patient from the breast cancer processed images. The main objective of this work is to rebuild and also to enhance each cell from the three component images provided by an input image. Indeed, from an initial segmentation obtained using the statistical features and histogram threshold techniques, the resulting segmentation may represent accurately the non complete and pasted cells and enhance them. This allows real help to doctors, and consequently, these cells become clear and easy to be counted. METHODS: A novel method for color edges extraction based on statistical features and automatic threshold is presented. The traditional edge detector, based on the first and the second order neighborhood, describing the relationship between the current pixel and its neighbors, is extended to the statistical domain. Hence, color edges in an image are obtained by combining the statistical features and the automatic threshold techniques. Finally, on the obtained color edges with specific primitive color, a combination rule is used to integrate the edge results over the three color components. RESULTS: Breast cancer cell images were used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method both quantitatively and qualitatively. Hence, a visual and a numerical assessment based on the probability of correct classification (P( C )), the false classification (P( f )), and the classification accuracy (Sens(%)) are presented and compared with existing techniques. The proposed method shows its superiority in the detection of points which really belong to the cells, and also the facility of counting the number of the processed cells. CONCLUSIONS: Computer simulations highlight that the proposed method substantially enhances the segmented image with smaller error rates better than other existing algorithms under the same settings (patterns and parameters). Moreover, it provides high classification accuracy, reaching the rate of 97.94%. Additionally, the segmentation method may be extended to other medical imaging types having similar properties.