Patent ID: 8379961

Claim:
A method for detecting and counting mitotic figures in an image of a biopsy sample stained with at least one dye, the method comprising the steps of: color filtering the image in a computer process to identify pixels in the image that have a color which is indicative of a mitotic figure; extracting the mitotic pixels in the image that are connected to one another in a computer process, thereby producing blobs of mitotic pixels; shape-filtering the blobs of mitotic pixels in a computer process to produce mitotic figure candidates; clustering neighboring ones of the candidates in a computer process to produce refined mitotic figure candidates; extracting sub-images of the refined mitotic figure candidates in a computer process by cropping the biopsy sample image at the location of the blobs; extracting two sets of features from the sub-images of the refined mitotic figure candidates in two separate computer processes; determining which of the mitotic figure candidates are mitotic figures in a computer classification process based on the extracted sets of features; and counting the number of mitotic figures per square unit of biopsy sample tissue.