Segmentation of epithelial human type 2 cell images for the indirect immune fluorescence based on modified quantum entropy

Abstract

The autoimmune disorders such as rheumatoid, arthritis, and scleroderma are connective tissue diseases (CTD). Autoimmune diseases are generally diagnosed using the antinuclear antibody (ANA) blood test. This test uses indirect immune fluorescence (IIf) image analysis to detect the presence of liquid substance antibodies at intervals the blood, which is responsible for CTDs. Typically human alveolar epithelial cells type 2 (HEp2) are utilized as the substrate for the microscope slides. The various fluorescence antibody patterns on HEp-2 cells permits the differential designation-diagnosis. The segmentation of HEp-2 cells of IIf images is therefore a crucial step in the ANA test. However, not only this task is extremely challenging, but physicians also often have a considerable number of IIf images to examine.In this study, we propose a new methodology for HEp2 segmentation from IIf images by maximum modified quantum entropy. Besides, we have used a new criterion with a flexible representation of the quantum image(FRQI). The proposed methodology determines the optimum threshold based on the quantum entropy measure, by maximizing the measure of class separability for the obtained classes over all the gray levels. We tested the suggested algorithm over all images of the MIVIA HEp 2 image data set.To objectively assess the proposed methodology, segmentation accuracy (SA), Jaccard similarity (JS), the F1-measure,the Matthews correlation coefficient(MCC), and the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) were used to evaluate performance. We have compared the proposed methodology with quantum entropy, Kapur and Otsu algorithms, respectively.The results show that the proposed algorithm is better than quantum entropy and Kapur methods. In addition, it overcomes the limitations of the Otsu method concerning the images which has positive skew histogram.This study can contribute to create a computer-aided decision (CAD) framework for the diagnosis of immune system diseases