Supervised learning framework for screening nuclei in tissue sections

Accurate segmentation of cell nuclei in microscope images of tissue sections is a key step in a number of biological and clinical applications. Often such applications require analysis of large image datasets for which manual segmentation becomes subjective and time consuming. Hence automation of the segmentation steps using fast, robust and accurate image analysis and pattern classification techniques is necessary for high throughput processing of such datasets. We describe a supervised learning framework, based on artificial neural networks (ANNs), to identify well-segmented nuclei in tissue sections from a multistage watershed segmentation algorithm. The successful automation was demonstrated by screening over 1400 well segmented nuclei from 9 datasets of human breast tissue section images and comparing the results to a previously used stacked classifier based analysis framework.