Identifying and Quantifying the Difference between Adenomatous Colon Polyps and Normal Colon Tissue from Clinical Histological Images

This study aimed to evaluate automated image analysis as a tool for differentiating normal tissue from adenomatous polyp lesions. Images of colon surgical pathology samples from 140 patients (70 normal subjects and 70 polyp subjects) were captured on a personal computer using an Olympus DP20 digital photomicrography apparatus mounted on an Olympus light microscope (trinocular) at 1200×1800 dots per inch resolution, with the high power magnification of ×400. The complexity of image patterns was studied. In particular, image features of Fractal Dimension (FD) and Lacunarity (Lac) were extracted by using non-overlapping and sliding box-counting techniques. There were highly significant differences between the two clinical groups for both techniques, with polyp images in comparison with normal tissue images having significantly greater FD (1.83±0.04 v 1.73±0.08 p<0.0001) and significantly smaller Lac (0.28±0.08 v 0.42±0.12 p<0.0001) by using the non-overlapping box-counting method, and similar results by using the sliding box-counting method (1.86±0.09 v 1.78±0.08 p<0.0001, and 0.26±0.08 v 0.37±0.12 p<0.0001, respectively). These results encourage the use of computer automation, as normal colon tissue and adenomatous polyp tissue can be significantly differentiated