Evaluation of blood smear is a commonly clinical test these days. Most of the time, the hematologists are interested on white blood cells (WBCs) only. Digital image processing techniques can help them in their analysis and diagnosis. For example, disease like acute leukemia is detected based on the amount and condition of the WBC.
The main objective of this paper is to segment the WBC to its two dominant elements: nucleus and cytoplasm. The segmentation is conducted using a proposed segmentation framework that consists of an integration of several digital image processing algorithms. Twenty microscopic blood images were tested, and the proposed framework managed to obtain 92% accuracy for nucleus segmentation and 78% for cytoplasm segmentation. The results indicate that the proposed framework is able to extract the nucleus and cytoplasm region in a WBC image sample.
Introduction:
White blood cells (WBC) or leukocytes play a significant role in the diagnosis of different diseases, and therefore, extracting information about that is valuable for hematologists. In the past, digital image processing techniques have helped to analyze the cells that lead to more accurate, standard, and remote disease diagnosis systems.
However, there are a few complications in extracting the data from WBC due to wide variation of cells in shape, size, edge, and position. Moreover, since illumination is imbalanced, the image contrast between cell boundaries and the background varies depending on the condition during the capturing process.
This study is focusing on WBC segmentation using L2 microscopic images. Our goal is to segment the WBC nucleuses and cytoplasm using a framework that has been developed using digital image processing. The use of image processing techniques have developed rapidly in the last few years, to the point where hematologists can use blood images to automatically process blood slides for the first screening in detecting diseases.
These techniques can help to find cell counts in human blood automatically and also can provide information about ratio of nucleus versus cytoplasm to identify and classify different types of WBCs such as neutrophil, basophil, lymphocyte, etc. Therefore, in this paper, we present a proposed framework that consists of several methods that integrates together for nucleus segmentation and cytoplasm extraction.
Source: Biological procedures online
Authors: Farnoosh Sadeghian, Zainina Seman, Abdul Rahman Ramli, Badrul Hisham Abdul Kahar, and M-Iqbal Saripan
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