Morphological estimation of Cellularity on Neo-adjuvant treated breast cancer histological images

Abstract

This paper describes a methodology that extracts morphological features from histological breast cancer images stained for Hematoxilyn and Eosin (H&E). Cellularity was estimated and the correlation between features and the residual tumour size cellularity after a Neo-Adjuvant treatment (NAT) was examined. Images from whole slide imaging (WSI) were processed automatically with traditional computer vision methods to extract twenty two morphological parameters from the nuclei, epithelial region and the global image. The methodology was applied to a set of images from breast cancer under NAT. The data came from the BreastPathQ Cancer Cellularity Challenge 2019, and consisted of 2579 patches of 255x255 pixels of H&E histopatological samples from NAT treatment patients. The methodology automatically implements colour separation, segmentation and morphological analysis using traditional algorithms (K-means grouping, watershed segmentation, Otsus binarisation). Linear regression methods were applied to determine strongest correlation between the parameters and the cancer cellularity. The morphological parameters showed correlation with the residual tumour cancer cellularity. The strongest correlations corresponded to the stroma concentration value (r = -0.9786) and value from HSV image colour space (r = -0.9728), both from a global image parameters.