Breaking through the Wall
Today is one of those special days when a lot of hard work comes to a head and you finally break though that brick wall you've been banging your head against for days, weeks, or in some cases, months. Yes, indeed, today I finally got CIA to recognize the cellular nuclei with a reasonable percentage. It was one simple idea - isn't it always? But that simple idea makes the work so much nicer.
Basically, what we needed to do was to isolate the fat from the non-cancerous cells. To do that we needed something that was similar to an edge-detector, but different enough that an edge-detector didn't work. I had tried it. So I came up with the idea of RMS error. Root Mean Square error - something from my old EE days would come to the rescue. I take the pixels in a neighborhood of the point in qiestion and calculate the RMS error in each of the three channels - red, green, and blue, and then save that for this point's value. The smaller the number the more 'constant' the image in the neighborhood of that point. Then I simply look for regions of small RMS error, and paint them with a color that will return a FALSE to the filter.
WHAM! Like a dream it worked. The fat was removed from consideration and the non-cancerous cells within the fat remained. It was really great. After that, it was a simple matter for the filter to do it's work and isolate the cell nuclei. I'm impressed. The idea was sound, the execution sound, and the results are great. "It is a good day for Science" as Dexter would say. I have to agree.