Simple Landscapes Analysis for Relevant Regions Detection in Breast Carcinoma Histopathological Images

Breast carcinoma represents a huge global health problem among women in both developed and developing countries. It is estimated that over 508,000 women worldwide died in 2011 due to breast carcinoma. Nottingham Histological Grading (NHG) system is recognized as the gold standard to provide overall grade for breast carcinoma. One of the breast carcinoma criteria considered in the grading system is tubule formation. The assessment of tubule formation starts with visual inspection on breast histopathological image using 10x magnification. However, not all regions in the image provide meaningful information. Histopathological image with score 3 in tubule formation usually has a small tubule size. Thus, a visual inspection at a higher magnification is required. A continuous inspection at a higher magnification is time consuming. By eliminating the irrelevant regions in the histopathological image, histopathologist can focus on the relevant region for further examination. This study proposed a simple method to detect relevant region on the breast histopathological images using landscape analysis. The proposed method was tested using three groups of histopathological images: Group 1: relevant and irrelevant regions, Group 2: relevant regions only and Group 3: irrelevant regions only. The proposed method is found to be effective in eliminating irrelevant regions as the overall accuracy for Groups 1, 2 and 3 are 86.6%, 100.0% and 100.0%, respectively.