A System for the Determination of Image Density and Morphometry Developed for the Analysis of Malignant Nuclei

Abstract

This paper describes SPCIM, a system developed for the analysis of image density and morphometry of malignant nuclei. The SPCIM has been applied in analysis of images from needle aspirations specimens, cervical intraepithelial neoplasia samples, smear of normal reproductive women and uterine-cervix smears slides of HIV-positive patients. Also, the SPCIM was applied with success in the Brazilian Papanicolaou quality control system. The main modules of the program SPCIM are "Image Acquisition", "Image Saving", "Nuclei Demarcation" and "Marked Nuclei Analysis". In this paper we emphasizes the algorithms of the module "Nuclei Demarcation", for dark regions, segmentation, area threshold, counting of regions, borderline of regions and validation of regions, that were adapted to optimize the functionality of SPCIM.