Features based on the percolation theory for quantification of non-Hodgkin lymphomas

Non-Hodgkin lymphomas are a health problem that affects over 70,000 people per year in the United States alone. The early diagnosis and the identification of this lymphoma are essential for an effective treatment. The classification of non-Hodgkin lymphomas is a task that continues to rank as one of the main challenges faced by hematologists, pathologists, as well as in the producing of computer vision methods due to its inherent complexity. In this paper, we present a new method to quantify and classify tissue samples of non-Hodgkin lymphomas based on the percolation theory. The method consists of associating multiscale and multidimensional approaches in order to divide the image into smaller regions and then verifying color similarity between pixels. A cluster labeling algorithm was applied to each region of interest to obtain the values for the number of clusters, occurrence of percolation and coverage ratio of the largest cluster. The method was tested on different classifiers aiming to differentiate three different groups of non-Hodgkin lymphomas. The obtained results (AUC rates between 0.940 and 0.993) were compared to those provided by methods consolidated in the Literature, which indicates that the percolation theory is a suitable approach for identifying these three classes of non-Hodgkin lymphomas, those being: mantle cell lymphoma, follicular lymphoma and chronic lymphocytic leukemia.