Identification and Quantification of Oncocytes in Microscopic Images

Nowadays great scientific fields, such as Medicine, have been recurring to technological advances in terms of computational power and storage capacity. Now it is possible to store large quantities of high resolution images in databases, allowing medical images to be saved for posterior analysis by experts. The problem associated with this resides in the task of manually analyze the images, which can be exhausting and time consuming, with the probability of having direct influence on the results and conclusions obtained by the pathologists, due to these factors and also their subjectivity. By applying Image Processing techniques and Data Mining methods, many medical images have been successfully analyzed with a computer, by means of automatic procedures showing results with high accuracies, that expert pathologists may use to better support their medical diagnosis decisions. Previous studies show that the presence of oncocytic cells in certain types of diseases, like thyroid tumors, may have direct influence on used treatments, which makes extremelly important for a pathologist to have access to this information, at the time he or she i