A Morphology Processing Approach For Image Processing In Cancer Diagnosis

Early tumor detection is critical for improving cancer treatment outcomes, enabling less invasive and more cost-effective interventions. However, limited access to pathologists and high patient volumes reduce diagnostic efficiency, particularly in underserved regions, underscoring the urgency for computational support tools. While deep learning has shown promise in tumor detection, it requires extensive annotated datasets, high computational resources, and long processing times, making it less feasible in certain contexts.This study introduces a lightweight image processing approach for detecting tumors in Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E)–stained histopathology images without deep learning. Using data from the PAIP 2023 Tumor Cellularity challenge, the proposed method applies histogram equalization, bilateral filtering, morphological transformations, bitwise operations, and an improved algorithm adapted from prior research. The method achieves IoU (Intersection of Union) of 0.93 compared to pathologist-determined ground truth. The results indicate that this approach can serve both as a standalone segmentation tool and as a preprocessing stage for deep learning pipelines, enhancing accessibility, reducing computational costs, and supporting broader adoption of computer-aided pathology in resource-limited settings.