CTCs extraction method based on frequency-domain filtering from microscope images

Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) can be used for the early detection of cancer and determination of the effectiveness of anticancer drug treatment. Sometimes CTC grows on a culture medium which has a honeycomb texture, and existing detection methods cannot achieve satisfactory results because the honeycomb textures are more salient than the CTCs edges. Thus, a CTCs extraction method for honeycomb textures from microscope images is needed.In this paper, we propose a new algorithm to remove honeycomb texture from microscope images. We confirmed that our proposed algorithm can sufficiently remove the honeycomb texture even the periodicity of the patterns are weak. Also our method achieves a high segmentation accuracy for images where the background is more salient than the CTCs edges.