Automated Gland Detection in Colorectal Histopathological Images

Abstract

Clinical morphological analysis of histopathological specimens is a successful manner for diagnosing benign and malignant diseases. Analysis of glandular architecture is a major challenge for colon histopathologists as a result of the difficulty of identifying morphological structures in glandular malignant tumours due to the distortion of glands boundaries, furthermore the variation in the appearance of staining specimens. For reliable analysis of colon specimens, several deep learning methods have exhibited encouraging performance in the glands automatic segmentation despite the challenges. In the histopathology field, the vast number of annotation images for training the deep learning algorithms is the major challenge. In this work, we propose a trainable Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) from end to end for detecting the glands automatically. More specifically, the Modified Res-U-Net is employed for segmenting the colorectal glands in Haematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) stained images for challenging Gland Segmentation (GlaS) dataset. The proposed Res-U-Net outperformed the prior methods that utilise U-Net architecture on the images of the GlaS dataset.