Color-texture based Extreme Learning Machines for Tissue Tumor Classification

In histopathological classification and diagnosis of cancer cases, pathologists perform visual assessments of immunohistochemistry (IHC)-stained biomarkers in cells to determine tumor versus non-tumor tissues. One of the prerequisites for such assessments is the correct identification of regions-of-interest (ROIs) with relevant histological features. Advances in image processing and machine learning give rise to the possibility of full automation in ROI identification by identifying image features such as colors and textures. Such computer-aided diagnostic systems could enhance research output and efficiency in identifying the pathology (normal, non-tumor or tumor) of a tissue pattern from ROI images. In this paper, a computational method using color-texture based extreme learning machines (ELM) is proposed for automatic tissue tumor classification. Our approach consists of three steps: (1) ROIs are manually identified and annotated from individual cores of tissue microarrays (TMAs); (2) color and texture features are extracted from the ROIs images; (3) ELM is applied to the extracted features to classify the ROIs into non-tumor or tumor categories. The proposed approach is tested on 100 sets of images from a kidney cancer TMA and the results show that ELM is able to achieve classification accuracies of 91.19% and 88.72% with a Gaussian radial basis function (RBF) and linear kernel, respectively, which is superior to using SVM with the same kernels.