Multi-tissue and multi-scale approach for nuclei segmentation in H&E stained images

BACKGROUND: Accurate nuclei detection and segmentation in histological images is essential for many clinical purposes. While manual annotations are time-consuming and operator-dependent, full automated segmentation remains a challenging task due to the high variability of cells intensity, size and morphology. Most of the proposed algorithms for the automated segmentation of nuclei were designed for specific organ or tissues. RESULTS: The aim of this study was to develop and validate a fully multiscale method, named MANA (Multiscale Adaptive Nuclei Analysis), for nuclei segmentation in different tissues and magnifications. MANA was tested on a dataset of H&E stained tissue images with more than 59,000 annotated nuclei, taken from six organs (colon, liver, bone, prostate, adrenal gland and thyroid) and three magnifications (10×, 20×, 40×). Automatic results were compared with manual segmentations and three open-source software designed for nuclei detection. For each organ, MANA obtained always an F1-score higher than 0.91, with an average F1 of 0.9305 ± 0.0161. The average computational time was about 20 s independently of the number of nuclei to be detected (anyway, higher than 1000), indicating the efficiency of the proposed technique. CONCLUSION: To the best of our knowledge, MANA is the first fully automated multi-scale and multi-tissue algorithm for nuclei detection. Overall, the robustness and versatility of MANA allowed to achieve, on different organs and magnifications, performances in line or better than those of state-of-art algorithms optimized for single tissues.