Unsupervised HEp-2 mitosis recognition in indirect immunofluorescence imaging

Automated HEp-2 mitotic cell recognition in IIF images is an important and yet scarcely explored step in the computer-aided diagnosis of autoimmune disorders. Such step is necessary to assess the goodness of the HEp-2 samples and helps the early diagnosis of the most difficult or ambiguous cases. In this work, we propose a completely unsupervised approach for HEp-2 mitotic cell recognition that overcomes the problem of mitotic/non-mitotic class imbalance due to the limited number of mitotic cells. Our technique automatically selects a limited set of candidate cells from the HEp-2 slide and then applies a clustering algorithm to identify the mitotic ones based on their texture. Finally, a second stage of clustering discriminates between positive and negative mitoses. Experiments on public IIF images demonstrate the performance of our technique compared to previous approaches.