Automated segmentation of regions of interest in whole slide skin histopathological images

In the diagnosis of skin melanoma by analyzing histopathological images, the epidermis and epidermis-dermis junctional areas are regions of interest as they provide the most important histologic diagnosis features. This paper presents an automated technique for segmenting epidermis and dermis regions from whole slide skin histopathological images. The proposed technique first performs epidermis segmentation using a thresholding and thickness measurement based method. The dermis area is then segmented based on a predefined depth of segmentation from the epidermis outer boundary. Experimental results on 66 different skin images show that the proposed technique can robustly segment regions of interest as desired.