부산대학교 도서관

Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) is an informative biomarker which assists pathologists in early diagnosis and evaluating therapeutic effects of patients with malignant tumors. The blood from a cancer patient is analyzed by a microscope and a large number of pictures including many cells are generated for each case. Thus, analyzing them is time-consuming work for pathologists, and misdiagnosis may happen since the diagnosis of CTCs tends to depend on the individual skill of pathologist. In this paper, we propose a method which detects cell candidate regions in microscopy images automatically to make quantitative analysis possible by computer. Our proposed method consists of three steps. In the first step, we extract initial cell candidate regions in microscopy images based on the saliency map. In the second step, we choose non-single cell regions from the initial candidates based on the SVM algorithm. In the third step, we separate connected regions into single cell regions based on the branch and bound algorithm. We demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed method using 540 microscopy images and we achieved a true positive rate of 99.04[%] and a false positive rate of 3.95[%].