Cell words: Modelling the visual appearance of cells in histopathology images

Detection and classification of cells in histological images is a challenging task because of the large intra-class variation in the visual appearance of various types of biological cells. In this paper, we propose a discriminative dictionary learning paradigm, termed as Cell Words, for modelling the visual appearance of cells which includes colour, shape, texture and context in a unified manner. The proposed framework is capable of distinguishing mitotic cells from non-mitotic cells (apoptotic, necrotic, epithelial) in breast histology images with high accuracy.