Epithelial area detection in cytokeratin microscopic images using MSER segmentation in an anisotropic pyramid

The objective of semantic segmentation in microscopic images is to extract the cellular, nuclear or tissue components. This problem is challenging due to the large variations of features of these components (size, shape, orientation or texture). In this paper we present an automatic technique to robustly delimit the epithelial area (crypts) in microscopic images taken from colon tissues sections marked with cytokeratin-8. The epithelial area is highlighted using the anisotropic diffusion pyramid and segmented using MSER+. The crypts separation and lumen detection is performed by imposing topological constraints about the epithelial layer distribution within the tissue and the round-like shape of the crypt. The evaluation of the proposed method is made by comparing the results with ground-truth segmentations.