An Unsupervised Approach for Overlapping Cervical Cell Cytoplasm Segmentation

The poor contrast and the overlapping of cervical cell cytoplasm are the major issues in the accurate segmentation of cervical cell cytoplasm. This paper presents an automated unsupervised cytoplasm segmentation approach which can effectively find the cytoplasm boundaries in overlapping cells. The proposed approach first segments the cell clumps from the cervical smear image and detects the nuclei in each cell clump. A modified Otsu method with prior class probability is proposed for accurate segmentation of nuclei from the cell clumps. Using distance regularized level set evolution, the contour around each nucleus is evolved until it reaches the cytoplasm boundaries. Promising results were obtained by experimenting on ISBI 2015 challenge dataset.

Unsupervised Segmentation of Overlapping Cervical Cell Cytoplasm

Overlapping of cervical cells and poor contrast of cell cytoplasm are the major issues in accurate detection and segmentation of cervical cells. An unsupervised cell segmentation approach is presented here. Cell clump segmentation was carried out using the extended depth of field (EDF) image created from the images of different focal planes. A modified Otsu method with prior class weights is proposed for accurate segmentation of nuclei from the cell clumps. The cell cytoplasm was further segmented from cell clump depending upon the number of nucleus detected in that cell clump. Level set model was used for cytoplasm segmentation.