Automated Nuclei Segmentation on Dysplastic Oral Tissues Using CNN

Dysplasia is a common oral premalignant lesion type that can be classified as mild, moderate and severe. The diagnosis of different types of dysplasia is made by a pathologist through complex and time consuming histological image analysis. The use of computer-aided diagnosis can be applied as a tool to aid and enhance the pathologists decisions. Recently, deep learning based methods are earning more and more attention and have been successfully applied to nuclei segmentation problems in several scenarios. In this paper, we present a method for automated nuclei segmentation on dysplastic oral tissues histological images using convolutional neural networks. We also evaluated the impact of color normalization techniques applied to the automated nuclei segmentation task on hematoxylin-eosin stained histological images. The proposed method achieves the best results overall when validated against other segmentation methods using a dataset composed of mice tongue histopathological images.