We have been developing a computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system for automatically recognizing cervical cancer cells from Papanicolaou smear. Considering that pathological changes of cervix can be indicated by the abnormity of the nucleus of intermediate cell, the key task of this system is to find the intermediate cells and segment the nucleus precisely. This paper presents a novel approach for automatic segmentation of microscopic cervical cell images using multispectral imaging techniques. In order to capture images at different wavelengths, a Liquid Crystal Tunable Filter (LCTF) device is used to provide wavelength selection from 400nm to 720nm with an increment of 10nm. Considering the spectral variances of background, nucleus and cytoplasm, background is extracted firstly from the microscopic images by calculating pixel intensity variance at 470nm, 530nm, 570nm, 580nm and 650nm. Then superficial cells are extracted apart from intermediate cells easily at 530nm 650nm because of the different pixel intensity distribution of the two kinds of cells at these two wavelengths. To segment the nucleus from intermediate cells, we adopt two procedures. Firstly, the nuclei are roughly segmented apart by using an iterative maximum deviation between-cluster algorithm. Secondly, a novel rigorous algorithm based on active contour model is adopted to achieve more exact nuclei segmentation. Using the method proposed in this paper, we did experiments on over 300 cervical smears, and the results show that this method is more robust and precise.
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