An ICPR 2012 Contest

We propose a contest of mitosis detection in images of H&E stained slides of breast cancer. Mitotic count is an important parameter for the prognosis of breast cancer. However, mitosis detection is a challenging problem and has not been addressed well in the literature. Indeed, mitosis detection is very challenging since mitosis appear in image as small objects with a large variety of shapes, and they can thus be confused with some other objects or artefacts present in the image.

We add a further dimension to the contest by using two different slide scanners having different resolution to produce RGB images and a multi-spectral microscope producing images in 10 different spectral bands and 17 layers Z-stack.

Special Issue

A selection of best papers submitted to the contest will be published in a special issue of the Journal of Pathology Informatics. Currently the papers submitted are being reviewed. The special issue is expected for June 2013.

Contestants

As of July 15th, 2012, there are 129 companies / research institutes / universities in 40 countries registered to the contest.

17 teams have sent their detection results.

Bibliography

Catherine Genestie, "Mammary Pathology", 2011 (PDF file size: 5.6 MB).

Metin N. Gurcan, Laura E. Boucheron, Ali Can, Anant Madabhushi, Nasir M. Rajpoot, and Bulent Yener, "Histopathological Image Analysis: A Review", IEEE Reviews in Biomedical Engineering, vol. 2, pp 147-171, 2009.

"Breast Cancer Grading Poster", NHS Cancer Screening Programmes and The Royal College of Pathologists, 2005 (PDF file size: 1.3 MB).

"Pathology Reporting of Breast Disease", NHS Cancer Screening Programmes and The Royal College of Pathologists, 2005 (PDF file size: 3.1 MB).

Elston, C.W. and Ellis, I.O., "Pathological prognostic factors in breast cancer. I. The value of histological grade in breast cancer: Experience from a large study with long-term follow-up", Histopathology, vol. 19, pp 403-410, 1991.

Acknowledgement

This contest is supported by the French National Research Agency ANR, project MICO under reference ANR-10-TECS-015.