Quantitative nuclear image analysis: differentiation between normal, hyperplastic, and malignant appearing uterine glands in a paraffin section. III. The use of texture features for differentiation.

Markov chain statistic based texture features were used to discriminate nuclei from three regions in a paraffin section of human endometrium. The data of the digitized nuclei from which the texture features were calculated were the same as described previously (Baak and Diegenbach, 1977; Diegenbach and Baak, 1977). Several texture features proved to give a good separation between two of the three groups of nuclei. Combining two or more features can make a separation of all three groups possible. Most of the features are correlated, indicating that fewer than the 20 features used are needed for discrimination. The results are much better than with the features described in the previous articles.