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 3 layers Z-stack.

Contestants

As of April 3rd, 2012, there are 118 companies / research institutes / universities in 39 countries registered to the contest.

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.