Figure 2.
The extraction and comparison of cell features are accomplished by several conversion and analytic routines. Since intensity values of these matrixes vary with both the incident light intensity (Io) and the optical density of the specimen, each intensity matrix is converted to an optical density matrix. Cell descriptors that are extracted include colorimetric, multi-resolution textural, and domain-specific morphologic parameters. Descriptors are then used as coordinates to map the characteristics of each cell to a position in feature space. When an unknown cell is submitted for evaluation, the distance between its position and the positions that characterize other cells in feature space are calculated. These distances are used to generate an ordered list of matches.