A Multichannel Watershed-Based Segmentation Method for Multispectral Chromosome Classification

Multiplex fluorescent in situ hybridization (M-FISH) is a recently developed chromosome imaging technique where each chromosome class appears to have a distinct color. This technique not only facilitates the detection of subtle chromosomal aberrations but also makes the analysis of chromosome images easier; both for human inspection and computerized analysis. In this paper, a novel method for segmentation and classification of M-FISH chromosome images is presented. The segmentation is based on the multichannel watershed transform in order to define regions of similar spatial and spectral characteristics. Then, a Bayes classifier, task-specific on region classification, is applied. Our method consists of four basic steps: 1) computation of the gradient magnitude of the image, 2) application of the watershed transform to decompose the image into a set of homogenous regions, 3) classification of each region, and 4) merging of similar adjacent regions. The method is evaluated using a publi...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: TMI
• Authors: Petros S. Karvelis, Alexandros T. Tzallas, Dimitrios I. Fotiadis, Ioannis Georgiou
• Keywords: Chromosome, Chromosome Image, Image, TMI 2008