Inflammatory Cells Detection in H&E Staining Histology Images Using Deep Convolutional Neural Network with Distance Transformation

Inflammatory cells such as lymphocytes and neutrophils are crucial indicators in diagnosing acute inflammation from liver histology images. However, there are several challenges in detecting the inflammatory cells. The inflammatory cells have large variation and also appear similar to other cells. In an often occasion, the inflammatory cells may overlap each other. It is also unavoidable to see the clustery noise in the background. To conquer the above-mentioned problems, this paper proposes a procedure, which implements the detection-then-classification by combining the distance transformation with deep convolutional neural networks for detecting an accurate position of each cell. Then a precise image patch can be extracted for a deep convolutional neural network for classification of the cells into nuclei, lymphocyte, neutrophils and impurity (e.g. Kupffer cell). The experimental results show that the proposed approach can effectively detect the inflammatory cells from H&E Staining liver histopathological images, with an accuracy of 93.7% in inflammatory cells classification.