Automated analysis of karyotype images.

Abstract

Karyotype is a genetic test that is used for detection of chromosomal defects. In a karyotype test, an image is captured from chromosomes during the cell division. The captured images are then analyzed by cytogeneticists in order to detect possible chromosomal defects. In this paper, we have proposed an automated pipeline for analysis of karyotype images. There are three main steps for karyotype image analysis: image enhancement, image segmentation and chromosome classification. In this paper, we have proposed a novel chromosome segmentation algorithm to decompose overlapped chromosomes. We have also proposed a CNN-based classifier which outperforms all the existing classifiers. Our classifier is trained by a dataset of about 1,62,000 human chromosome images. We also introduced a novel post-processing algorithm which improves the classification results. The success rate of our segmentation algorithm is 95%. In addition, our experimental results show that the accuracy of our classifier for human chromosomes is 92.63% and our novel post-processing algorithm increases the classification results to 94%.