Coarse-to-fine texture analysis for inner cell mass identification in human blastocyst microscopic images

Accurate identification of different components of a developing human embryo play crucial roles in assessing the quality of such embryo. One of the most important components of a day-5 human embryo is Inner Cell Mass (ICM). ICM is a part of an embryo that will eventually develop into a fetus. In this paper, an automatic coarse-to-fine texture based approach presented to identify regions of an embryo corresponding to the ICM. First, blastocyst area corresponding to the textured regions is recognized using Gabor and DCT features. Next, two ICM localization approaches are introduced to identify a rough estimate of the ICM location. Finally, the boundaries of the ICM region is finalized using a region based level-set. Experimental results on a data set of 220 day-5 human embryo images confirm that the proposed method is capable of identifying ICM with average Precision, Recall, and Jaccard Index of 78.7%, 86.8%, and 70.3%, respectively.