Evaluation and comparison of cell nuclei detection algorithms

The processing of microscopic tissue images and especially the detection of cell nuclei is nowadays done more and more using digital imagery and special immunodiagnostic software products. Since several methods (and applications) were developed for the same purpose, it is important to have a measuring number to determine which one is more efficient than the others. The purpose of the article is to develop a generally usable measurement number that is based on the “gold standard” tests used in the field of medicine and that can be used to perform an evaluation using any of image segmentation algorithms. Since interpreting the results themselves can be a pretty time consuming task, the article also contains a recommendation for the efficient implementation and a simple example to compare three algorithms used for cell nuclei detection.