Multimodal method for cell membrane extraction in hepatic histological images

A multimodal method, which uses different kinds of imaging methods, was applied to extract cell membranes in microscopic images of hematoxylin and eosin-stained hepatic histological sections. Cell membrane extraction in hepatic histological images is difficult because the color difference between the cell membrane and the cytoplasm is small in bright-field images. Three kinds of imaging methods, bright-field, dark-field, and phase-contrast imaging, were used because they are readily available for general pathologists. These imaging methods can be switched easily by revolving a combined condenser with the same phase-contrast objective lens. Therefore, little additional time and cost are needed for this approach. Experimental results show the effectiveness of this approach. The correct rate was improved by using additional color information obtained by dark-field and phase-contrast images compared to conventional bright-field images. The best correct rate was obtained when color information of all three images was used. A graphical user interface to calculate the N/C ratio was developed by combining cell membrane extraction with conventional cell nucleus extraction.