Segmentation Methodologies for the Construction of Hyperspectral Cell Nuclei Databases in Histopathology

Resumen

Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) extends conventional histopathology by combining spatial morphology with rich spectral information that reflects tissue biochemical composition, offering new opportunities for quantitative tissue analysis. However, reliable spectral analysis requires accurate instance-level segmentation of cell nuclei to enable the construction of meaningful nuclear spectral databases. In this work, a comprehensive methodology for generating hyperspectral databases of cell nuclei from histopathological samples is presented, including hyperspectral acquisition, preprocessing, nucleus segmentation, and spectral signature extraction. Three nucleus segmentation methods are evaluated: a spectral-only approach based on pixel-wise hyperspectral signatures in the visible-VNIR range; a spatial-only approach using synthetic RGB images derived from hyperspectral cubes; and a combined spatial-spectral approach that jointly exploits spatial and spectral information. The methods are assessed on a proprietary dataset of 30 hyperspectral cubes of tumor and healthy histopathological brain tissue annotated by expert pathologists. The spectral-only method achieves a Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of 61.89% and produces severe over-segmentation, with cell count deviations exceeding substantially the ground truth in healthy tissue. The spatial-only method attains the highest pixel-wise accuracy (78.97% DSC) but underestimates nucleus counts by approximately 30% in tumor regions due to nucleus merging. The spatial-spectral method achieves a DSC of 73.13% and a mean cell count deviation of 4%, providing more reliable instance-level separation. These findings demonstrate that pixel-wise accuracy alone is insufficient for hyperspectral nuclear database generation.