The black ink (India ink) and melanin are substances often found in histopathological images of skin specimens. If present in abundant quantity, they negatively affect the outcome of automatic stain deconvolution methods. We propose an automatic black ink and melanin segmentation method based on global color threshol- ding in CIELAB color space combined with a novel region growing approach. Our technique achieved sensitivity of 87 %, specificity of 99 %, and precision of 94% for black ink detection. It segmented melanin with sensitivity of 93 %, specificity of 99 %, and precision of 84 %. When excluding certain regions of images before performing color deconvolution, we observed better approximation of the stain unmixing matrix.

Date Published: 6 March 2018
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 10581, Medical Imaging 2018: Digital Pathology, 105811A (6 March 2018); doi: 10.1117/12.2292859

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 10581:
Medical Imaging 2018: Digital Pathology
John E. Tomaszewski; Metin N. Gurcan, Editor(s)