A parallel approach to tubule grading in breast cancer lesions and its VLSI implementation

A parallel VLSI-oriented algorithm for grading tubules in digitized images of microscopic slide information of breast cancer malignancies is presented. The techniques used are to select the bright cores of tubular areas using a single threshold and then to extend these bright cores according to the surroundings of these areas. This is effective in detecting regions that warrant further analysis. Based on the different features between tubule areas and rough texture areas (i.e. a tubule area is circular, homogeneous, and its boundary is dark), a 3×3 mask Laplacian and extension operation are used to effectively separate the tubule areas from the rough texture areas. The experimental results are satisfactory. The essential parallelism of the proposed algorithm makes it easy to implement by using a VLSI architecture, where each processing element only needs to perform addition, subtraction, or comparison