Glioma Grading Using Cell Nuclei Morphologic Features in Digital Pathology Images

This work proposes a computationally efficient cell nuclei morphologic feature analysis technique to characterize the brain gliomas in tissue slide images. In this work, our contributions are two-fold: 1) obtain an optimized cell nuclei segmentation method based on the pros and cons of the existing techniques in literature, 2) extract representative features by k-mean clustering of nuclei morphologic features to include area, perimeter, eccentricity, and major axis length. This clustering based representative feature extraction avoids shortcomings of extensive tile [1] [2] and nuclear score [3] based methods for brain glioma grading in pathology images. Multilayer perceptron (MLP) is used to classify extracted features into two tumor types: glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) and low grade glioma (LGG). Quantitative scores such as precision, recall, and accuracy are obtained using 66 clinical patients' images from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) [4] dataset. On an average ~94% accuracy from 10 fold cross-validation confirms the efficacy of the proposed method.