In recent years, hysteroscopy, used as an outpatient
office procedure, in combination with endometrial
biopsy, has demonstrated its great potential as the method
of first choice in the diagnosis of various gynecological
abnormalities including abnormal uterine bleeding (AUB)
and endometrial cancer (CA). In patients suffering with
AUB, the blood vessels of the endometrium are hypertrophic,
whereas in the case of CA vascularization is irregular
or anarchic. In this paper, a methodology for the classification
of hysteroscopical images of endometrium using
vessel and texture features is presented. A total of 28
patients with abnormal uterine bleeding, 10 patients with
endometrial cancer and 39 subjects with no pathological
condition were imaged. 16 of the patients with AUB were
premenopausal and 12 postmenopausal, all with CA were
postmenopausal, and all with no pathological condition
were premenopausal. All images were examined for the
appearance of endometrial vessels and non-vascular
structures. For each image, 167 texture and vessel’s features
were initially extracted, which were reduced after
feature selection in only 4 features. The images were
classified into three categories using artificial neural networks
and the reported classification accuracy was 91.2 %,
while the specificity and sensitivity were 83.8 and 93.6 %
respectively.