Curvelet-based classification of prostate cancer histological images of critical Gleason scores

This paper is aimed at the development of an approach of applying the curvelet transform to images of prostatectomy pathological specimens of critical Gleason grades for computer-aided classification. A set of Tissue MicroArray (TMA) images from the Johns Hopkins University have been used as the data base. We utilize a moving window to sample multiple patches of a given image leading to a majority decision by the patches for image class assignment. The curvelet-based feature extraction may capture both textural and, implicitly, structural information in an image patch. A tree-structured classifier consisting of three Gaussian-kernel support vector machines each with an embedded voting mechanism has been successfully trained and tested yielding high accuracy to classify tissue images of four critical Gleason scores (GS) 3+3, 3+4, 4+3 and 4+4. The experimental result has demonstrated an enhanced performance as compared to other reported works.