Segmentation of Sinusoids in Hematoxylin and Eosin Stained Liver Specimens Using an Orientation-Selective Filter

Masahiro Ishikawa, Sercan Taha Ahi, Fumikazu Kimura, Masahiro Yamaguchi, Hiroshi Nagahashi, Akinori Hashiguchi, Michiie Sakamoto

Department of Pathology, Graduate School of Medicine, Keio University, Shinjuku-ku, Japan.
Global Scientific Information and Computing Center, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Meguroku, Japan.
Global Scientific Information and Computing Center, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Meguroku, Japan; Faculty of Health & Medical Care, Saitama Medical University, Hidaka-shi, Japan.

DOI: 10.4236/ojmi.2013.34022                

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.

Keywords

Histopathological Tissue Images; Orientation-Selective Filter; Segmentation of Sinusoids

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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