Texture Analysis Based on Structural Co-occurrence Matrix Improves the Colorectal Tissue Characterization

Colorectal cancer causes the deaths of thousands of people worldwide according to the World Health Organization. Automatic tissue recognition of histopathological images is essential for early disease diagnosis. Most research consists of employing texture descriptors to capture features that identify tumor samples. However, accurate multi-class classification is a challenge due to the complexity of colorectal tissue images. Recently, researchers have shown that the analysis of texture structural patterns degraded by image filtering provides valuable features for pre-diagnosis in several medical applications. Here we propose an approach to automatically classify eight types of colorectal tissues using Structural Co-occurrence Matrix. We carried on experiments on 5000 tissue patches from a public dataset to evaluate our algorithm, considering two scenarios: structural differences as a single descriptor, and combined with other characteristics. We found that our strategy improves the state-of-the-art, achieving, accuracy: 91.30%, precision: 91.41%, sensitivity: 91.31%, specificity: 98.76% e F1-score: 91.31%.