Abstract
Background A various number of imaging modalities are available (e.g., magnetic resonance, x-ray, ultrasound, and biopsy) where each modality can reveal different structural aspects of tissues. However, the analysis of histological slide images that are captured using a biopsy is considered the gold standard to determine whether cancer exists. Furthermore, it can reveal the stage of cancer. Therefore, supervised machine learning can be used to classify histopathological tissues. Several computational techniques have been proposed to study histopathological images with varying levels of success. Often handcrafted techniques based on texture analysis are proposed to classify histopathological tissues which can be used with supervised machine learning. Methods In this paper, we construct a novel feature space to automate the classification of tissues in histology images. Our feature representation is to integrate various features sets into a new texture feature representation. All of our descriptors are computed in the complex Shearlet domain. With complex coefficients, we investigate not only the use of magnitude coefficients, but also study the effectiveness of incorporating the relative phase (RP) coefficients to create the input feature vector. In our study, four texture-based descriptors are extracted from the Shearlet coefficients: co-occurrence texture features, Local Binary Patterns, Local Oriented Statistic Information Booster, and segmentation-based Fractal Texture Analysis. Each set of these attributes captures significant local and global statistics. Therefore, we study them individually, but additionally integrate them to boost the accuracy of classifying the histopathology tissues while being fed to classical classifiers. To tackle the problem of high-dimensionality, our proposed feature space is reduced using principal component analysis. In our study, we use two classifiers to indicate the success of our proposed feature representation: Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Decision Tree Bagger (DTB). Results Our feature representation delivered high performance when used on four public datasets. As such, the best achieved accuracy: multi-class Kather (i.e., 92.56%), BreakHis (i.e., 91.73%), Epistroma (i.e., 98.04%), Warwick-QU (i.e., 96.29%). Conclusions Our proposed method in the Shearlet domain for the classification of histopathological images proved to be effective when it was investigated on four different datasets that exhibit different levels of complexity.