Experimental assessment of color deconvolution and color normalization for automated classification of histology images stained with hematoxylin and eosin

Histological evaluation plays a major role in cancer diagnosis and treatment. The appearance of H&E-stained images can vary significantly as a consequence of differences in several factors, such as reagents, staining conditions, preparation procedure and image acquisition system. Such potential sources of noise can all have negative effects on computer-assisted classification. To minimize such artefacts and their potentially negative effects several color pre-processing methods have been proposed in the literature—for instance, color augmentation, color constancy, color deconvolution and color transfer. Still, little work has been done to investigate the efficacy of these methods on a quantitative basis. In this paper, we evaluated the effects of color constancy, deconvolution and transfer on automated classification of H&E-stained images representing different types of cancers—specifically breast, prostate, colorectal cancer and malignant lymphoma. Our results indicate that in most cases color pre-processing does not improve the classification accuracy, especially when coupled with color-based image descriptors. Some pre-processing methods, however, can be beneficial when used with some texture-based methods like Gabor filters and Local Binary Patterns.