Identifying touching and overlapping chromosomes using the watershed transform and gradient paths

Authors:
Petros Karvelis;Aristidis Likas;Dimitrios I. Fotiadis
Affiliations:
Department of Computer Science, University of Ioannina, GR 45110 Ioannina, Greece and Unit of Medical Technology and Intelligent Information Systems, Department of Materials Science and Engineerin ...;Department of Computer Science, University of Ioannina, GR 45110 Ioannina, Greece;Unit of Medical Technology and Intelligent Information Systems, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Ioannina, GR 45110 Ioannina, Greece
Venue:
Pattern Recognition Letters
Year:
2010

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Abstract

Automation of chromosome analysis has long been considered as a difficult task. However the advent of Multiplex Fluorescence In Situ Hybridization (M-FISH) made the analysis of chromosomes much easier. Nevertheless, the chromosomes in an M-FISH image do very often partially occlude each other; hence, their segmentation is not trivial and requires the application of a dedicated procedure. In this paper a method is presented for the segmentation of touching and overlapping groups of chromosomes in M-FISH images. Initially, the watershed transform is applied and the image is decomposed into watershed regions. Next, gradient paths starting from points of high concavity are computed for each produced region. Finally, adjacent regions are merged producing the final chromosome areas. To validate our method a benchmark database of 183 M-FISH images has been used. The proposed algorithm resulted in a 90.6% success rate for touching chromosomes and 80.4% for overlapping groups of chromosomes.