Human Dendritic Cells Classification based on Possibility Theory

Dendritic cells can be seen as a mirror of our immune system. Based on their in virto analysis, biological experts are now able to study the impact of food contaminants on the human immune system. Accordingly, a visual characterization of dendritic cell morphology can provide an indirect estimation of the toxicity. In this paper, we propose an automatic classification of dendritic cells that could serve as a second non-subjective opinion for pathologists. The proposed approach is built on pre-processing steps for segmentation and cell detection in microscopic images. Then, a set of features such as shape descriptors are extracted for cell characterization. At this step, three cell classes are distinctively identified by experts. Nevertheless, a high ambiguity is revealed between cell classes. Possibility theory can offer a realistic framework for making reliable decisions under high ambiguity. It exploits a human natural concept of the implicit use of probability distribution for deciding on the possibility of some assertions in some contexts where a cognitive conflict is observed while interfering existing related postulates, leading to high ambiguity. Based on the consistency concept of Dubois and Prade, a transformation of the probability into a possibility distribution is undertaken. Under possibility paradigm, a further feature selection in the possibility space using the Shapely index. Compared to state-of-the art methods the proposed approach yielded on a real dataset of nearly 630 samples an improvement in terms of the mean precision rate, the Recall rate, and the F1-measure.