PCSeg: Color model driven probabilistic multiphase level set based tool for plasma cell segmentation in multiple myeloma

PLoS One. 2018 Dec 12;13(12):e0207908. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0207908. eCollection 2018.

Abstract

Plasma cell segmentation is the first stage of a computer assisted automated diagnostic tool for multiple myeloma (MM). Owing to large variability in biological cell types, a method for one cell type cannot be applied directly on the other cell types. In this paper, we present PCSeg Tool for plasma cell segmentation from microscopic medical images. These images were captured from bone marrow aspirate slides of patients with MM. PCSeg has a robust pipeline consisting of a pre-processing step, the proposed modified multiphase level set method followed by post-processing steps including the watershed and circular Hough transform to segment clusters of cells of interest and to remove unwanted cells. Our modified level set method utilizes prior information about the probability densities of regions of interest (ROIs) in the color spaces and provides a solution to the minimal-partition problem to segment ROIs in one of the level sets of a two-phase level set formulation. PCSeg tool is tested on a number of microscopic images and provides good segmentation results on single cells as well as efficient segmentation of plasma cell clusters.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted / methods*
  • Humans
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted
  • Microscopy
  • Multiple Myeloma / diagnosis*
  • Multiple Myeloma / pathology
  • Pattern Recognition, Automated / methods
  • Plasma Cells / classification*
  • Plasma Cells / cytology
  • Software

Grants and funding

The work was funded by Department of Science and Technology, Govt. of India. Grant Number: EMR/2016/006183 and the Ministry of Communication and IT, Govt. of India. Grant Number: 1(7)/2014-ME&HI. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.