The antinuclear antibody detection with human epithelial cells is a popular approach for autoimmune diseases diagnosis. The manual evaluation demands time, effort and capital, and automation in screening can greatly aid the physicians in these respects. In this work, we employ simple, efficient and visually more interpretable, class-specific features which defined based on the visual characteristics of each class. We believe that defining features with a good visual interpretation, is indeed important in a scenario, where such an approach is used in an interactive CAD system for pathologists. Considering that problem consists of few classes, and our rather simplistic feature definitions, frameworks can be structured as hierarchies of various binary classifiers. These variants include frameworks which are earlier explored and some which are not explored for this task. We perform various experiments which include traditional texture features and demonstrate the effectiveness of class-specific features in various frameworks. We make insightful comparisons between different types of classification frameworks given their silent aspects and pros and cons over each other. We also demonstrate an experiment with only intermediates samples for testing. The proposed work yields encouraging results with respect to the state-of-the-art and highlights the role of class-specific features in different classification frameworks.
 The Anti-Nuclear Antibodies (ANA) test using Human Epithelial (HEp-2) cells has been the gold standard to identify the presence of Connective Tissue Diseases (CTD) such us Systemic Lupus Erythomatus (SLE). As the ANA test is time consuming, labor intensive and subjective, there has been an on-going effort to develop image-based Computer Aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems. This paper discusses the current progress and challenges in this field and will highlight areas which require more attention. Updates the state of the art in HEp-2 cell and specimen image classification.Analyses and compares 15 methods tested over a common and very large dataset.Highlights the key elements of the best performing methods. The Indirect Immunofluorescence (IIF) protocol applied on Human Epithelial type 2 (HEp-2) cells is the current gold standard for the Antinuclear Antibody (ANA) test. The formulation of the diagnosis requires the visual analysis of a patients specimen under a fluorescence microscope in order to recognize the cells staining pattern which could be related to a connective tissue disease. This analysis is time consuming and error prone, thus in the recent past we have witnessed a growing interest in the pattern recognition scientific community directed at the development of methods for supporting this complex task. The main driver of the interest towards this problem is represented by the series of international benchmarking initiatives organized in the last four years that allowed dozens of research groups to propose innovative methodologies for HEp-2 cells staining pattern classification. In this paper we update the state of the art on HEp-2 cells and specimens classification, by analyzing the performance achieved by the methods participating the contest on Performance Evaluation of IIF Image Analysis Systems, hosted by the 22nd edition of the International Conference on Pattern Recognition ICPR 2014, and to the Executable Thematic Special Issue of Pattern Recognition Letters on Pattern Recognition Techniques for IIF Images Analysis, and by highlighting the trends in the design of the best performing methods.