Patent ID: 11232567

Abstract:
As the capabilities of digital histopathology machines grows, there is an increasing need to ease the burden on pathology professionals of finding interesting structures in such images. Digital histopathology images can be at least several Gigabytes in size, and they may contain millions of cell structures of interest. Automated algorithms for finding structures in such images have been proposed, such as the Active Contour Model (ACM). The ACM algorithm can have difficulty detecting regions in images having variable colour or texture distributions. Such regions are often found in images containing cell nuclei, because nuclei do not always have a homogeneous appearance. The present application describes a technique to identify inhomogeneous structures, for example, cell nuclei, in digital histopathology information. It is proposed to search pre-computed super-pixel information using a morphological variable, such as a shape-compactness metric, to identify candidate objects.