Quantitative analysis of benign and malignant tumors in histopathology: Predicting prostate cancer grading using SVM

An adenocarcinoma is a type of malignant cancerous tissue that forms from a glandular structure in epithelial tissue. Analyzed stained microscopic biopsy images were used to perform image manipulation and extract significant features for support vector machine (SVM) classification, to predict the Gleason grading of prostate cancer (PCa) based on the morphological features of the cell nucleus and lumen. Histopathology biopsy tissue images were used and categorized into four Gleason grade groups, namely Grade 3, Grade 4, Grade 5, and benign. The first three grades are considered malignant. K-means and watershed algorithms were used for color-based segmentation and separation of overlapping cell nuclei, respectively. In total, 400 images, divided equally among the four groups, were collected for SVM classification. To classify the proposed morphological features, SVM classification based on binary learning was performed using linear and Gaussian classifiers. The prediction model yielded an accuracy of 88.7% for malignant vs. benign, 85.0% for Grade 3 vs. Grade 4, 5, and 92.5% for Grade 4 vs. Grade 5. The SVM, based on biopsy-derived image features, consistently and accurately classified the Gleason grading of prostate cancer. All results are comparatively better than those reported in the literature.