Image Guided Decision Support
System for Pathology
Dorin Comaniciu(1) Peter Meer(1) David Foran(2)
(1) Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ 08855, USA
(2)Center for Biomedical Imaging
UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School
Piscataway, NJ 08854, USA
We present an image content-based retrieval system to support decision
making in clinical pathology. The Image Guided Decision Support (IGDS)
system locates, retrieves, and displays cases which exhibit
morphological profiles consistent to the case in question. It uses an
image database containing 261 digitized specimens which belong to
three classes of lymphoproliferative disorders and a class of healthy
leukocytes. The reliability of the central module, the fast color
segmenter, makes possible unsupervised on-line analysis of the query
image and extraction of the features of interest: shape, area, and
texture of the nucleus. The nuclear shape is characterized through
similarity invariant Fourier descriptors while the texture analysis is
based on a multiresolution simultaneous autoregressive model. The
system performance was assessed through ten-fold cross-validated
classification and compared with that of a human expert. To
facilitate a natural man-machine interface, speech recognition and
voice feedback are integrated. Client-server communication is
multithreaded, Internet based, and provides access to supporting
clinical records and video databases.
Appeared in
Machine Vision and Applications, 11, 213-224, 1999.
Preliminary descriptions appeared in
14th Int'l Conference on Pattern Recognition August 1998,
Brisbane, Australia, 902-904, and
WACV'98 - 4th IEEE Workshop on Applications of Computer
Vision, October 1998, Princeton, NJ. 76-87.
