SEGMENTATION OF HISTOLOGICAL TISSUE IMAGES INTO GLANDULAR STRUCTURES FOR PROSTATE CANCER TISSUE CLASSIFICATION

The method according to the invention utilizes a color decomposition of histological tissue image data to derive a density map. The density map corresponds to the portion of the image data that contains the stain/tissue combination corresponding to the stroma, and at least one gland is extracted from said density map. The glands are obtained by a combination of a mask and a seed for each gland derived by adaptive morphological operations, and the seed is grown to the boundaries of the mask. The method may also derive an epithelial density map used to remove small objects not corresponding to epithelial tissue. The epithelial density map may further be utilized to improve the identification of glandular regions in the stromal density map. The segmented gland is extracted from the tissue data utilizing the grown seed as a mask. The gland is then classified according to its associated features.