Open Access

ARTICLE

Epithelial Layer Estimation Using Curvatures and Textural Features for Dysplastic Tissue Detection

by Afzan Adam^1,*, Abdul Hadi Abd Rahman¹, Nor Samsiah Sani¹, Zaid Abdi Alkareem Alyessari¹, Nur Jumaadzan Zaleha Mamat², Basela Hasan³

1 Faculty of Information Science and Technology, Center for Artificial Intelligence Technology, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Bangi, Selangor, 43300, Malaysia
2 Faculty of Science and Technology, School of Mathematical Sciences, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Bangi, Selangor, 43300, Malaysia
3 Department of Information Technology and Computing, Faculty of Computer Studies, Arab Open University, Amman, Jordan

* Corresponding Author: Afzan Adam. Email:

(This article belongs to the Special Issue: AI, IoT, Blockchain Assisted Intelligent Solutions to Medical and Healthcare Systems)

Computers, Materials & Continua 2021, 67(1), 761-777. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2021.014599

Received 02 October 2020; Accepted 14 November 2020; Issue published 12 January 2021

Abstract

Boundary effect in digital pathology is a phenomenon where the tissue shapes of biopsy samples get distorted during the sampling process. The morphological pattern of an epithelial layer is greatly affected. Theoretically, the shape deformation model can normalise the distortions, but it needs a 2D image. Curvatures theory, on the other hand, is not yet tested on digital pathology images. Therefore, this work proposed a curvature detection to reduce the boundary effects and estimates the epithelial layer. The boundary effect on the tissue surfaces is normalised using the frequency of a curve deviates from being a straight line. The epithelial layer’s depth is estimated from the tissue edges and the connected nucleolus only. Then, the textural and spatial features along the estimated layer are used for dysplastic tissue detection. The proposed method achieved better performance compared to the whole tissue regions in terms of detecting dysplastic tissue. The result shows a leap of kappa points from fair to a substantial agreement with the expert’s ground truth classification. The improved results demonstrate that curvatures have been effective in reducing the boundary effects on the epithelial layer of tissue. Thus, quantifying and classifying the morphological patterns for dysplasia can be automated. The textural and spatial features on the detected epithelial layer can capture the changes in tissue.

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Keywords

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