Sparse Non-negative Matrix Factorization (SNMF) based color unmixing for breast histopathological image analysis

In clinical practice, pathologists visually examine tissue samples under a microscope for the purpose of diagnosing the presence of disease. Different colour stains are usually used to indicate the presence of different proteins. Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) are standard stains that highlight nuclei in blue/purple and cytoplasm in pink in order to visualize the structure of interest in the tissue [28]. Hematoxylin (H) dye can stain all nuclei in the H&E histopathological images. Therefore, in order to detect or segment all the nuclei, one popular idea (such as blue ratio algorithm [7]) is to detect H stains or blue color in the image.

Source: Computerized Medical Imaging and Graphics - April 28, 2015 Category: Radiology Authors: Jun Xu, Lei Xiang, Guanhao Wang, Shridar Ganesan, Michael Feldman, Natalie NC Shih, Hannah Gilmore, Anant Madabhushi Source Type: research