Cluster Analysis of Cell Nuclei in H&E-Stained Histological Sections of Prostate Cancer and Classification Based on Traditional and Modern Artificial Intelligence Techniques

Biomarker identification is very important to differentiate the grade groups in the histopathological sections of prostate cancer (PCa). Assessing the cluster of cell nuclei is essential for pathological investigation. In this study, we present a computer-based method for cluster analyses of cell nuclei and performed traditional (i.e., unsupervised method) and modern (i.e., supervised method) artificial intelligence (AI) techniques for distinguishing the grade groups of PCa. Two datasets on PCa were collected to carry out this research. Histopathology samples were obtained from whole slides stained with hematoxylin and eosin (H&E). In this research, state-of-the-art approaches were proposed for color normalization, cell nuclei segmentation, feature selection, and classification. A traditional minimum spanning tree (MST) algorithm was employed to identify the clusters and better capture the proliferation and community structure of cell nuclei. K-medoids clustering and stacked ensemble machine learning (ML) approaches were used to perform traditional and modern AI-based classification. The binary and multiclass classification was derived to compare the model quality and results between the grades of PCa. Furthermore, a comparative analysis was carried out between traditional and modern AI techniques using different performance metrics (i.e., statistical parameters). Cluster features of the cell nuclei can be useful information for cancer grading. However, further validation of cluster analysis is required to accomplish astounding classification results.

An optimal nuclei segmentation method based on enhanced multi-objective GWO

In breast cancer image analysis, reliable segmentation of the nuclei is still an open-ended research problem. In this paper, a new clustering-based nuclei segmentation method is presented. First, the proposed method pre-processes the histopathology image through SLIC method. Then, a novel variant of multi-objective grey wolf optimizer is employed to group the obtained super-pixels into optimal clusters. Lastly, the optimal cluster with minimum value is segmented as the nuclei region. The experimental results demonstrates that the proposed variant of multi-objective grey wolf algorithm surpasses the existing multi-objective algorithms over ten standard multi-objective benchmark functions belonging to different categories. Particularly, the proposed variant has achieved best fitness value of more than 0.90 on 90% of the considered functions. Further, the nuclei segmentation accuracy of the proposed method is validated on H&E-stained estrogen receptor positive (ER+) breast cancer images. Experimental results illustrates that the proposed method has attained dice-coefficient value of more than 0.52 on 80% of the images. This illustrates that the proposed method is efficient in producing efficacious segmenting over histology images of Breast cancer.