Use of imperfectly segmented nuclei in the classification of histopathology images of breast cancer

Many features used in the analysis of pathology imagery are inspired by grading features defined by clinical pathologists as important for diagnosis and characterization. A large majority of these features are features of cell nuclei; as such, there is often the desire to segment the imagery into individual nuclei prior to feature extraction and further analysis. In this paper we present an analysis of the utility of imperfectly segmented cell nuclei for classification of H&E stained histopathology imagery of breast tissue. We show the object- and image-level classification performance using these imperfectly segmented nuclei in a benign versus malignant decision. Results indicate that very good classification accuracies can be achieved with imperfectly segmented nuclei and further that perfect nuclei segmentation does not necessarily guarantee better classification accuracy.