EFFICIENT SEGMENTATION OF LIVER TISSUE TO DETECT LIVER

HYPERTROPHY AT THE CELLULAR LEVEL BY EXTRACTING

NUCLEUS COUNT
RAVINDRANATH K
Assistant professor, Department of ECE DBIT,Bangalore-74

SUSHMA G
Assistant professor Department of ECE MSEC, Bangalore

NARENDRA REDDY K
Sixth semester ECE SVCE Bangalore

GIRISH J R
Assistant Professor, Department of ECE SBIT, Bangalore

ABSTRACT: Liver Hypertrophy is the case where the excessive enlargement of the organ takes
place if the condition is not treated at the early stage it later leads to necrosis and cirrhosis to
identify the condition proper diagnosis has to be done, to support the diagnosis I have come up
with an paper where the enlargement is identified by reduction in the number of cells in the
cytoplasm of the standard size image (which is obtained from the electron microscope) the nucleus
is been extracted from the tissue and the number is used to conclude the case.

KEYWORDS: Hyper trophy , cell, Nucleus,Tissue.

INTRODUCTION

The liver is a vital organ present in vertebrates and some other animals. It has a wide range of
functions, including detoxification, protein synthesis, and production of biochemicals necessary
for digestion. The liver is necessary for survival; there is currently no way to compensate for the
absence of liver function long term, although liver dialysis can be used short term.

This organ plays a major role in metabolism and has a number of functions in the body, including
glycogen storage, decomposition of red blood cells, plasma protein synthesis, hormone production,
and detoxification. It lies below the diaphragm in the abdominal-pelvic region of the abdomen. It
produces bile, an alkaline compound which aids in digestion via the emulsification of lipids. The
liver's highly specialized tissues regulate a wide variety of high-volume biochemical reactions,
including the synthesis and breakdown of small and complex molecules, many of which are
necessary for normal vital functions. Medical terms related to the liver often start in hepato- or
hepatic from the Greek word for liver.

A human liver normally weighs 1.441.66 kg (3.23.7 lb), and is a soft, pinkish-brown, triangular
organ. It is both the largest internal organ (the skin being the largest organ overall) and the largest
gland in the human body. It is located in the right upper quadrant of the abdominal cavity, resting
just below the diaphragm. The hepatic artery carries blood from the aorta, whereas the portal vein
carries blood containing digested nutrients from the entire gastrointestinal tract and also from the
spleen and pancreas.Pictorial presentation of the project is shown in Figure 2-2, which shows
collection of samples to obtain the nucleus count.

Figure 2.1: Pictorial representation of hypertrophy detection

System level block diagram

Methods of segmentation
Based on color

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 Color intensity
Edge detection
Thresholding

Based on color
The image is examined for different colors and the color objects which are required are retained
and the remaining objects are removed from the image from the figures below one can observe
that the colors which of not interest are removed and colors of interest are retained. Figure 3.4(a)
shows the normal image from the examination we can decide the colors of interest are red and
magenta by applying the segmentation we can extract only the colors of interest so that the nucleus
can be extracted as shown in Figure 3.4(b).Figure 3.4(c).

Figure 3.4(a): original

Figure 3.4(b): segmentation based on missing red color objects

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 Figure 3.4(c): segmentation based on missing magenta color objects

Advantage: Method is faster and simpler

Disadvantage: lot of information is lost which is needed for the further analysis

Based on intensity
Every color image is made up of three color components (R, G, B) R=red, G=green, B=blue, the
pixels can be examined for the intensity of the image using the command imtool(image), hence the
three planes of R,G,B are separated and visualized for the better results The outputs are obtained in
MATLAB by separating these three components are shown in Figures 3.5(b), Figures 3.5(c),
Figures 3.5(d).

Figure: 3.5(a) : Original image

Figure: 3.5(b): segmentation based on missing red components

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 Figure: 3.5(c): image segmentation based on missing blue components

Fig: 3.5(d) : image segmentation based on missing green components

Advantage: It is easier method with high accuracy

Disadvantage: computational steps are more

Edge detection
The purpose of detecting sharp changes in image brightness is to capture important events and
changes in properties of the world. It can be shown that under rather general assumptions for an
image formation model, discontinuities in image brightness are likely to correspond to:

discontinuities in depth,
discontinuities in surface orientation,
changes in material properties and
Variations in scene illumination.

In the ideal case, the result of applying an edge detector to an image may lead to a set of connected
curves that indicate the boundaries of objects, the boundaries of surface markings as well as curves
that correspond to discontinuities in surface orientation. Thus, applying an edge detection

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algorithm to an image may significantly reduce the amount of data to be processed and may
therefore filter out information that may be regarded as less relevant, while preserving the
important structural properties of an image. If the edge detection step is successful, the subsequent
task of interpreting the information contents in the original image may therefore be substantially
simplified.

The basic edge-detection operator is a matrix area gradient operation that determines the level of
variance between different pixels. The edge-detection operator is calculated by forming a matrix
centered on a pixel chosen as the center of the matrix area. If the value of this matrix area is above
a given threshold, then the middle pixel is classified as an edge. Examples of gradient-based edge
detectors are Roberts, Prewitt, and Sobel operators. All the gradient-based algorithms have kernel
operators that calculate the strength of the slope in directions, which are orthogonal to each other,
commonly vertical and horizontal. Later, the contributions of the different components of the
slopes are combined to give the total value of the edge strength.

Experimental procedure:
1. Convert color image to gray image using command image=rgb2gray (img).
2. Apply different edge detection algorithms trial for the best results e.g.: sobel, canny,
prewitt, Robert, compass etc.,

The experimental results obtained after applying edge detection algorithms on the original image
as shown in Figure 3.6.

Figure 3. 1:Showing different edge detection techniques applied on gray image

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Advantage: accuracy is maintained
Disadvantage: computational steps are more, with more complexity

Threshold segmentation:
Image segmentation is a key technology in image processing, and threshold segmentation is one of
the methods used frequently. Aimed at that only one threshold or several thresholds are set in
traditional threshold-based segmentation algorithm, it is difficult to extract the complex
information in an image; a new segmentation algorithm that each pixel in the image has its own
threshold is proposed. In this algorithm, the threshold of a pixel in an image is estimated by
calculating the mean of the grayscale values of its neighbor pixels, and the square variance of the
grayscale values of the neighbor pixels are also calculated as an additional judge condition, so that
the result of the proposed algorithm is the binary image as shown in Figure:3.7.

1 , if pixel value is 130>p<150

fbw =
0 , else where ..Eq 3.1.

Where fbw =binary value

Figure 3. 2:Output of threshold segmentation

Four different segmentation are used out of which threshold segmentation provides the results with
higher accuracy and less complexity as summarized in Table 3.1.

Table 3. 1: Comparison of segmentation techniques

Methodologies Performance Complexity Computation
(segmentation) steps
Color Good More More
Color intensity Better More More
Edge detection Good More Less
Intensity Best Less Less
Threshold Best Less Less

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