An Extended Method of Higher-order Local Autocorrelation Feature Extraction for Classification of Histopathological Images

In histopathological diagnosis, a clinical pathologist discriminates between normal tissues and cancerous tissues. However, recently, the shortage of clinical pathologists is posing increasing burdens on meeting the demands for such diagnoses, and this is becoming a serious social problem. Currently, it is necessary to develop new medical technologies to help reduce their burdens. Therefore, as a diagnostic support technology, this paper describes an extended method of HLAC feature extraction for classification of histopathological images into normal and anomaly. The proposed method can automatically classify cancerous images as anomaly by using an extended geometric invariant HLAC features with rotation- and reflection-invariant properties from three-level histopathological images, which are segmented into nucleus, cytoplasm and background. In conducted experiments, we demonstrate a reduction in the rate of not only false-negative errors but also of false-positive errors, where a normal image is falsely classified as an image with an anomaly that is suspected as being cancerous.