title: Colour-texture based image analysis method for assessing the hormone receptors status in breast tissue sections.
abstract: Hormone receptors have been used in prognosis of breast carcinomas and their positive status is of clinical value in hormonal therapy. Determination of this status is based on the subjective visual inspection of the stained nuclei in the specimens. The aim of this study was the assessment of the estrogen receptor's (ER) positive status of breast carcinomas, by means of colour-texture based image analysis methodology. Twenty two cases of immunohistochemically (IHC) stained breast biopsies were initially assessed by a histopathologist for ER positive status, following a clinical scoring protocol. Custom-designed image analysis software was developed for automatically assessing the ER positive status, employing colour textural features and the k-Nearest Neighbor weighted votes classification algorithm. Computer-based image analysis system resulted in 86.4% overall accuracy and in 0.875 Kendall's coefficient of concordance (p<0.001), ranking correctly 19/22 cases. Colour-texture analysis of IHC stained specimens might have an impact in the quantitative assessment of ER status.
authors.affiliation: Medical Image Processing and Analysis Group, Laboratory of Medical Physics, School of Medicine, University of Patras, 26500 Rio, Greece. skostopoulos@upatras.gr
authors.forename: Spiros
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Kostopoulos
authors.forename: Dionisis
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Cavouras
authors.forename: Antonis
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Daskalakis
authors.forename: Panagiotis
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Bougioukos
authors.forename: Pantelis
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Georgiadis
authors.forename: George C
authors.initials: GC
authors.lastname: Kagadis
authors.forename: Ioannis
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Kalatzis
authors.forename: Panagiota
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Ravazoula
authors.forename: George
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Nikiforidis
mesh_terms: D001940:Breast / Q000166:cytology* / Q000473:pathology; D001943:Breast Neoplasms / Q000473:pathology*; D002467:Cell Nucleus / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging; D003936:Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; D011960:Receptors, Estrogen / Q000032:analysis*; D014463:Ultrasonography
chemical_list: D011960:Receptors, Estrogen