A novel morphological segmentation method for evaluating estrogen receptors´ status in breast tissue images

In this paper, we propose a fully automated method able to perform accurate nuclear segmentation in immunohistochemical breast tissue images in order to provide quantitative assessment of estrogen receptor´s status that will help pathologists in their diagnosis. The presented approach is based on color deconvolution and an enhanced morphological processing, which is used to identify positive stained nuclei and to separate all touching nuclei in the microscopic image for a subsequent cancer evaluation. Experiments on several breast cancer images of different patients admitted into the Tunisian Salah Azaiez Cancer Center, show the efficiency of the proposed method when compared to the manual evaluation of experts.