Detection of Circulating Tumor Cells in Fluorescence Microscopy Images Based on ANN Classifier

Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) is a clinical biomarker for cancer metastasis. CTCs are cells circulating in the body of patients by being separated from primary cancer and entering into blood vessel. CTCs spread every positions in the body, and this is one of the cause of cancer metastasis. To analyze them, pathologists get information about metastasis without invasive test. CTCs test is conducted by analyzing the blood sample from patient. The fluorescence microscope generates a large number of images per each sample, and images contain a lot of cells. There are only a few CTCs in images and cells often have blurry boundaries. So CTCs identification is not an easy work for pathologists. In this paper, we develop an automatic CTCs identification method in fluorescence microscopy images. This proposed method has three section. In the first approach, we conduct the cell segmentation in images by using filtering methods. Next, we compute feature values from each CTC candidate region. Finally, we identify CTCs using artificial neural network algorithm. We apply the proposed method to 5895 microscopy images (7 samplesas), and evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed method by using leave-one-out cross validation. We achieve the result of performance tests, a true positive rate is 92.57% and false positive rate is 9.156%.