• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.10 no.7
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• pp.846-855
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• 2007

Significant feature extraction in cancer cell image analysis is an important process for grading cell carcinoma. In this study, we propose a method for 3D quantitative analysis of cell nuclei based upon digital image cytometry. First, we acquired volumetric renal cell carcinoma data for each grade using confocal laser scanning microscopy and segmented cell nuclei employing color features based upon a supervised teaming scheme. For 3D visualization, we used a contour-based method for surface rendering and a 3D texture mapping method for volume rendering. We then defined and extracted the 3D morphological features of cell nuclei. To evaluate what quantitative features of 3D analysis could contribute to diagnostic information, we analyzed the statistical significance of the extracted 3D features in each grade using an analysis of variance (ANOVA). Finally, we compared the 2D with the 3D features of cell nuclei and analyzed the correlations between them. We found statistically significant correlations between nuclear grade and 3D morphological features. The proposed method has potential for use as fundamental research in developing a new nuclear grading system for accurate diagnosis and prediction of prognosis.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.11 no.12
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• pp.1635-1648
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• 2008

The extraction of important features in cancer cell image analysis is a key process in grading renal cell carcinoma. In this study, we applied three-dimensional (3D) texture feature extraction methods to cell nuclei images and evaluated the validity of them for computerized cell nuclei grading. Individual images of 2,423 cell nuclei were extracted from 80 renal cell carcinomas (RCCs) using confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM). First, we applied the 3D texture mapping method to render the volume of entire tissue sections. Then, we determined the chromatin texture quantitatively by calculating 3D gray-level co-occurrence matrices (3D GLCM) and 3D run length matrices (3D GLRLM). Finally, to demonstrate the suitability of 3D texture features for grading, we performed a discriminant analysis. In addition, we conducted a principal component analysis to obtain optimized texture features. Automatic grading of cell nuclei using 3D texture features had an accuracy of 78.30%. Combining 3D textural and 3D morphological features improved the accuracy to 82.19%. As a comparative study, we also performed a stepwise feature selection. Using the 4 optimized features, we could obtain more improved accuracy of 84.32%. Three dimensional texture features have potential for use as fundamental elements in developing a new nuclear grading system with accurate diagnosis and predicting prognosis.