Artificial bee colony algorithm for automatic leukocytes segmentation in histopathological images

An automatic segmentation of leukocytes can assist pharmaceutical companies to take decisions in the discovery of drug and encourages for development of automated leukocytes recognition system. Segmentation of leukocytes in tissue images is a complex process due to the presence of various noise effects, large variability in the images, and shape of the nuclei. Surprisingly, rare efforts have been done to automate the segmentation of leukocytes in various disease models on Hematoxylin and Eosin stained tissue images. The present work proposes a novel method based on artificial bee colony algorithm to segment the leukocytes from the images of mice skin sections stained with Hematoxylin and Eosin staining and acquired at 40 x magnification. The results show that the proposed method outperforms when compared with the well known segmentation methods.