title: Computer aided quantification of pathological features for flexor tendon pulleys on microscopic images.
abstract: Quantifying the pathological features of flexor tendon pulleys is essential for grading the trigger finger since it provides clinicians with objective evidence derived from microscopic images. Although manual grading is time consuming and dependent on the observer experience, there is a lack of image processing methods for automatically extracting pulley pathological features. In this paper, we design and develop a color-based image segmentation system to extract the color and shape features from pulley microscopic images. Two parameters which are the size ratio of abnormal tissue regions and the number ratio of abnormal nuclei are estimated as the pathological progression indices. The automatic quantification results show clear discrimination among different levels of diseased pulley specimens which are prone to misjudgments for human visual inspection. The proposed system provides a reliable and automatic way to obtain pathological parameters instead of manual evaluation which is with intra- and interoperator variability. Experiments with 290 microscopic images from 29 pulley specimens show good correspondence with pathologist expectations. Hence, the proposed system has great potential for assisting clinical experts in routine histopathological examinations.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science & Information Engineering, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan 701, Taiwan.
authors.forename: Yung-Chun
authors.initials: YC
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: Hsin-Chen
authors.initials: HC
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.forename: Hui-Hsuan
authors.initials: HH
authors.lastname: Shih
authors.forename: Tai-Hua
authors.initials: TH
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.forename: Hsiao-Bai
authors.initials: HB
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.forename: Dee-Shan
authors.initials: DS
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.forename: Fong-Chin
authors.initials: FC
authors.lastname: Su
authors.forename: Yung-Nien
authors.initials: YN
authors.lastname: Sun
mesh_terms: D002467:Cell Nucleus / Q000473:pathology; D053144:Cell Nucleus Shape; D003116:Color; D019295:Computational Biology; D003936:Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D006801:Humans; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods; D008853:Microscopy; D013710:Tendons / Q000473:pathology*; D052582:Trigger Finger Disorder / Q000473:pathology*