Regenerative Random Forest with Automatic Feature Selection to Detect Mitosis in Histopathological Breast Cancer Images

We propose a fast and accurate method for counting the mitotic figures from histopathological slides using regenerative random forest. Our method performs automatic feature selection in an integrated manner with classification. The proposed random forest assigns a weight to each feature (dimension) of the feature vector in a novel manner based on the importance of the feature (dimension). The forest also assigns a misclassification-based penalty term to each tree in the forest. The trees are then regenerated to make a new population of trees (new forest) and only the more important features survive in the new forest. The feature vector is constructed from domain knowledge using the intensity features of nucleus, features of nuclear membrane and features of the possible stroma region surrounding the cell. The use of domain knowledge improves the classification performance. Experiments show at least 4% improvement in F-measure with an improvement in time complexity on the MITOS dataset from ICPR 2012 grand challenge.