Image Processing in Breast Carcinoma Histopathological Image: A Review

Breast carcinoma grading of histopathological images is the standard clinical practice for the prognosis and diagnosis of breast carcinoma development. The grading provides semi-quantitative assessment for mitotic activity, tubules formation and nucleus pleomorphism. Semi-quantitative scores obtained from the manual grading are inconsistent and may lead to inter- and intra- raters variability. Fortunately, the recent advances in image processing have significantly increased the possibility of fully quantifying the breast carcinoma features, reducing workload of pathologist and providing reproducible and high accuracy results. This paper is meant as an introduction for non- experts. It starts with an overview of the breast carcinoma, breast carcinoma grading systems and followed by a discussion on different image processing techniques applied to measure tubules formation, nucleus pleomorphism and mitotic activity as well as a discussion on complete system for the breast carcinoma measurement.