Morphological classification of cancerous cells

We present a new method for the automatic recognition of cancerous cells from a digitized picture of a microscopic section. The method is based on the analysis of four criteria of malignancy, in relation with the shape and the size of the observed cells. It provides the physician with nonsubjective numerical values for the four concerned criteria of malignancy, in order to help him to decide whether the tissue is cancerous or not. The automatic approach described uses mathematical morphology, first to remove the background noise from the image and to operate a segmentation of the nuclei of the cells, which contain most of the features of malignancy, next to analyse the shape and the size of these nuclei and lastly to evaluate their texture. From the values of the four extracted criteria, an automatic classification of the image is using a Kohonen neural network