title: Efficient segmentation of skin epidermis in whole slide histopathological images.
abstract: Segmentation of epidermis areas is an important step towards automatic analysis of skin histopathological images. This paper presents a robust technique for epidermis segmentation in whole slide skin histopathological images. The proposed technique first performs a coarse epidermis segmentation using global thresholding and shape analysis. The epidermis thickness is then estimated by a series of line segments perpendicular to the main axis of the initially segmented epidermis mask. If the segmented epidermis mask has a thickness greater than a predefined threshold, the segmentation is suspected to be inaccurate. A second pass of fine segmentation using k-means algorithm is then carried out over these coarsely segmented result to enhance the performance. Experimental results on 64 different skin histopathological images show that the proposed technique provides a superior performance compared to the existing techniques.
authors.forename: Hongming
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Xu
authors.forename: Mrinal
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Mandal
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D004817:Epidermis / Q000473:pathology*; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D008545:Melanoma / Q000473:pathology; D057054:Molecular Imaging; D012878:Skin Neoplasms / Q000473:pathology