3D-Reconstruction of Basal Cell Carcinoma A Proof-of-Principle Study

摘要

This work presents a complete processing-chain for a 3D-reconstruction of Basal Cell Carcinoma (BCC). BCC is the most common malignant skin cancer with a high risk of local recurrence after insufficient treatment. Therefore, we have focused on the development of an automated image-processing chain for 3D-reconstruction of BCC using large histological serial sections. We introduce a novel kind of image-processing chain (core component: non-linear image registration) which is optimised for the diffuse nature of BCC. For full-automatic delineation of the tumour within the tissue we apply a fuzzy c-means segmentation method, which does not calculate a hard segmentation decision but class membership probabilities. This feature moves the binary decision tumorous vs. non-tumorous to the end of the processing chain, and it ensures smooth gradients which are needed for a consistent registration. We used a multi-grid form of the nonlinear registration effectively suppressing registration runs into local minima (possibly caused by diffuse nature of the tumour). To register the stack of images this method is applied in a new way to reduce a global drift of the image stack while registration. Our method was successfully applied in a proof-of-principle study for automated tissue volume reconstruction followed by a quantitative tumour growth analysis.