Crowdsourcing for Chromosome Segmentation and Deep Classification

Metaphase chromosome analysis is one of the primary techniques utilized in cytogenetics. Observations of chromosomal segments or translocations during metaphase can indicate structural changes in the cell genome, and is often used for diagnostic purposes. Karyotyping of the chromosomes micro-photographed under metaphase is done by characterizing the individual chromosomes in cell spread images. Currently, considerable effort and time is spent to manually segment out chromosomes from cell images, and classifying the segmented chromosomes into one of the 24 types, or for diseased cells to one of the known translocated types. Segmenting out the chromosomes in such images can be especially laborious and is often done manually, if there are overlapping chromosomes in the image which are not easily separable by image processing techniques. Many techniques have been proposed to automate the segmentation and classification of chromosomes from spread images with reasonable accuracy, but given the criticality of the domain, a human in the loop is often still required. In this paper, we present a method to segment out and classify chromosomes for healthy patients using a combination of crowdsourcing, preprocessing and deep learning, wherein the non-expert crowd from CrowdFlower is utilized to segment out the chromosomes from the cell image, which are then straightened and fed into a (hierarchical) deep neural network for classification. Experiments are performed on 400 real healthy patient images obtained from a hospital. Results are encouraging and promise to significantly reduce the cognitive burden of segmenting and karyotyping chromosomes.