title: Charisma: an integrated approach to automatic H&E-stained skeletal muscle cell segmentation using supervised learning and novel robust clump splitting.
abstract: Histological image analysis plays a key role in understanding the effects of disease and treatment responses at the cellular level. However, evaluating histology images by hand is time-consuming and subjective. While semi-automatic and automatic approaches for image segmentation give acceptable results in some branches of histological image analysis, until now this has not been the case when applied to skeletal muscle histology images. We introduce Charisma, a new top-down cell segmentation framework for histology images which combines image processing techniques, a supervised trained classifier and a novel robust clump splitting algorithm. We evaluate our framework on real-world data from intensive care unit patients. Considering both segmentation and cell property distributions, the results obtained by our method correspond well to the ground truth, outperforming other examined methods.
authors.affiliation: Department of Intensive Care Medicine, KU Leuven, O&N1 UZ Herestraat 49, 3000 Leuven, Belgium. Electronic address: thomas.janssens2@med.kuleuven.be.
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Janssens
authors.forename: Laura
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Antanas
authors.forename: Sarah
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Derde
authors.forename: Ilse
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Vanhorebeek
authors.forename: Greet
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Van den Berghe
authors.forename: Fabian
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Güiza Grandas
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D058948:Cell Tracking / Q000379:methods; D002478:Cells, Cultured; D004801:Eosine Yellowish-(YS); D006416:Hematoxylin; D006801:Humans; D007089:Image Enhancement / Q000379:methods; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D008853:Microscopy / Q000379:methods*; D018485:Muscle Fibers, Skeletal / Q000166:cytology*; D010363:Pattern Recognition, Automated / Q000379:methods*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D012984:Software; D018511:Systems Integration
chemical_list: D004801:Eosine Yellowish-(YS); D006416:Hematoxylin
keywords: Clump splitting; Histology; Image segmentation; Machine learning; Skeletal muscle