A PCNN Framework for Blood Cell Image Segmentation

This research presents novel methods for segmenting digital blood cell images under a Pulse Coupled Neural Network (PCNN) framework. A blood cell image contains different types of blood cells found in the peripheral blood stream such as red blood cells (RBCs), white blood cells (WBCs), and platelets. WBCs can be classified into five normal types – neutrophil, monocyte, lymphocyte, eosinophil, and basophil – as well as abnormal types such as lymphoblasts and others. The focus of this research is on identifying and counting RBCs, normal types of WBCs, and lymphoblasts. The total number of RBCs and WBCs, along with classification of WBCs, has important medical significance which includes providing a physician with valuable information for diagnosis of diseases such as leukemia. The approach comprises two phases – segmentation and cell separation – followed by classification of WBC types including detection of lymphoblasts. The first phase presents two methods based on PCNN and region growing to segment followed by a separate method that combines Circular Hough Transform (CHT) with a separation algorithm to find and separate each RBC and WBC object into separate images. The first method uses a standard PCNN to segment. The second method uses a region growing PCNN with a maximum region size to segment. The second phase presents a WBC classification method based on PCNN. It uses a PCNN to capture the texture features of an image as a sequence of entropy values known as a texture vector. First, the parameters of the texture vector PCNN are defined. This is then used to produce texture vectors for the training images. Each cell type is represented by several texture vectors across its instances. Then, given a test image to be classified, the texture vector PCNN is used to capture its texture vector, which is compared to the texture vectors for classification. This two-phase approach yields metrics based on the RBC and WBC counts, WBC classification, and identification of lymphoblasts. Both the standard and region growing PCNNs were successful in segmenting RBC and WBC objects, with better accuracy when using the standard PCNN. The separate method introduced with this research provided accurate WBC counts but less accurate RBC counts. The WBC subimages created with the separate method facilitated cell counting and WBC classification. Using a standard PCNN as a WBC classifier, introduced with this research, proved to be a successful classifier and lymphoblast detector. While RBC accuracy was low, WBC accuracy for total counts, WBC classification, and lymphoblast detection were overall above 96%

Color image enhancement of acute leukemia cells in blood microscopic image for leukemia detection sample

Leukemia is a type of cancer that affects the white blood cell. Early detection of leukemia is important to reduce the rate of mortality. In order to detect acute leukemia, conventional screening method based on microscopic image is used, where sample of blood cell will be taken from the suspected leukemia patient and manually white blood cell (WBC) condition is observed using microscope. The manual screening process is tedious, time consuming and usually prone to error due to low contrast between the nucleus and cytoplasm of WBCs. This report introduces a new enhancement method which is a combination of Particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm and contrast stretching, known as Hybrid PSO-Contrast stretching (HPSO-CS). The PSO has been used to optimize the fitness criterion in order to improve the contrast and detail in microscopic image by adapting the parameters as a contribution to enhancement technique. In this study, PSO algorithm is used to perform image segmentation to remove all the unwanted part such as red blood cell (RBC), platelet and also the background while retain the WBC part. The segmentation algorithm uses saturation S-component based on Hue, Saturation, Intensity (HSI) color model. After the segmentation is done, contrast stretching process is applied to the original image to stretch intensity of the pixel. Then the segmented image is combined with the resultant image that has been stretched to produce the enhanced image. The results of the proposed method are evaluated by using mean-square error (MSE), Peak-signal-to-noise-ratio (PSNR) and Absolute mean brightness error (AMBE). This proposed method is benchmarked by comparing against two image enhancement methods, global enhancement and Class Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE). Based on the results, it can be concluded that quality of the enhanced image for the proposed method is much better with the lowest MSE (2067.651), AMBE (43.51827) and highest PSNR (14.98671) compared to th..

A color and shape based algorithm for segmentation of white blood cells in peripheral blood and bone marrow images

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Computer-based imaging systems are becoming important tools for quantitative assessment of peripheral blood and bone marrow samples to help experts diagnose blood disorders such as acute leukemia. These systems generally initiate a segmentation stage where white blood cells are separated from the background and other nonsalient objects. As the success of such imaging systems mainly depends on the accuracy of this stage, studies attach great importance for developing accurate segmentation algorithms. Although previous studies give promising results for segmentation of sparsely distributed normal white blood cells, only a few of them focus on segmenting touching and overlapping cell clusters, which is usually the case when leukemic cells are present. In this article, we present a new algorithm for segmentation of both normal and leukemic cells in peripheral blood and bone marrow images. In this algorithm, we propose to model color and shape characteristics of white blood cells by defining two transformations and introduce an efficient use of these transformations in a marker-controlled watershed algorithm. Particularly, these domain specific characteristics are used to identify markers and define the marking function of the watershed algorithm as well as to eliminate false white blood cells in a postprocessing step. Working on 650 white blood cells in peripheral blood and bone marrow images, our experiments reveal that the proposed algorithm improves the segmentation performance compared with its counterparts, leading to high accuracies for both sparsely distributed normal white blood cells and dense leukemic cell clusters. (C) 2014 International Society for Advancement of Cytometr

Computer-aided acute leukemia blast cells segmentation in peripheral blood images

Computer-aided diagnosis system of leukemic cells is vital tool, which can assist domain experts in the diagnosis and evaluation procedure. Accurate blast cells segmentation is the initial stage in building a successful computer-aided diagnosis system. Blast cells segmentation is still an open research topic due to several problems such as variation of blats cells in terms of color, shape and texture, touching and overlapping of cells, inconsistent image quality, etc. Although numerous blast cells segmentation methods have been developed, only few studies attempted to address these problems simultaneously. This paper presents a new image segmentation method to extract acute leukemia blast cells in peripheral blood. The first aim is to segment the leukemic cells by mean of color transformation and mathematical morphology. The method also introduces an approach to split overlapping cells using the marker-controlled watershed algorithm based on a new marker selection scheme. Furthermore, the paper presents a powerful approach to separate the nucleus region and the cytoplasm region based on the seeded region growing algorithm powered by histogram equalization and arithmetic addition to handle the issue of non-homogenous nuclear chromatin pattern. The robustness of the proposed method is tested on two datasets comprise of 1024 peripheral blood images acquired from two different medical centers. The quantitative evaluation reveals that the proposed method obtain a better segmentation performance compared with its counterparts and achieves remarkable segmentation results of approximately 96 % in blast cell extraction and 94 % in nucleus/cytoplasm separation

Performance Comparison of Segmentation Techniques for Nucleus in Chronics Leukemia

Morphological criteria have been used by haematologists to identify malignant cells in the blood smear sample under a light microscope. Experienced hematologist must perform this screening operation. However, manual screening using microscope is time-consuming and tedious. Thus, an automated or semi-automated image screening and diagnosis system are very helpful. An ideal automated screening system will acts as a human expert during the procedure. To formulate this idea, there are few steps involves in this process which is the acquisition of image, image segmentation, features extraction and recognition of image data for further analysis in computer-based. However, segmentation of a region of interest is the most crucial task to extract features for further learning and diagnose. This paper represents two segmentation techniques and their performance comparison based on clustering approach which are k-means and moving k-means clustering algorithms. The segmentation process is performed on ten chronics leukaemia images. The performance of segmentation based on the proposed techniques was evaluated. The proposed segmentation techniques offer high accuracies of segmentation which is more than 97% for both techniques

Imaging White Blood Cells using a Snapshot Hyper-Spectral Imaging System

Automated white blood cell (WBC) counting systems process an extracted whole blood sample and provide a cell count. A step that would not be ideal for onsite screening of individuals in triage or at a security gate. Snapshot Hyper-Spectral imaging systems are capable of capturing several spectral bands simultaneously, offering co-registered images of a target. With appropriate optics, these systems are potentially able to image blood cells in vivo as they flow through a vessel, eliminating the need for a blood draw and sample staining. Our group has evaluated the capability of a commercial Snapshot Hyper-Spectral imaging system, specifically the Arrow system from Rebellion Photonics, in differentiating between white and red blood cells on unstained and sealed blood smear slides. We evaluated the imaging capabilities of this hyperspectral camera as a platform to build an automated blood cell counting system. Hyperspectral data consisting of 25, 443x313 hyperspectral bands with ~3nm spacing were captured over the range of 419 to 494nm. Open-source hyperspectral datacube analysis tools, used primarily in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) applications, indicate that white blood cells\u27 features are most prominent in the 428-442nm band for blood samples viewed under 20x and 50x magnification over a varying range of illumination intensities. The system has shown to successfully segment blood cells based on their spectral-spatial information. These images could potentially be used in subsequent automated white blood cell segmentation and counting algorithms for performing in vivo white blood cell counting

Automatic detection for acute lymphoid leukemia images based non local region approach

Orientador: Prof. Dr. Lucas Ferrari de OliveiraDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal do Paraná, Setor de Ciências Exatas, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Informática. Defesa : Curitiba, 03/09/2018Inclui referências: p.90-95Resumo: A leucemia linfoide aguda (LLA) é o tipo de câncer mais comum a se manifestar na infância, apesar de apresentar rápida evolução em seu quadro clínico a LLA possui relativamente baixa mortalidade quando identificada e tratada em seu estágio inicial. Como o diagnóstico de LLA é feito por médicos hematologistas com base na análise microscópica de lâminas contendo amostras de sangue periférico, o que pode ser considerado um trabalho lento e cansativo impactando no desempenho do médico, o desenvolvimento de ferramentas que auxiliem neste processo é uma necessidade real. A proposta deste trabalho é apresentar um algoritmo capaz de segmentar os leucócitos existentes, extrair e selecionar características gerando uma representação compacta e por fim utilizar um classificador para diferenciar imagens de sangue periférico de pacientes saudáveis de pacientes portadores de LLA. A base de imagens ALL_IDB foi escolhida para ser utilizada por ser uma base de domínio público e também utilizada em outros trabalhos permitindo comparações precisas, e apresentar diversas dificuldades encontradas no trabalho com imagens provenientes de microscópio, como diferentes tipos de iluminação e zoom. Das 108 imagens utilizadas nos testes 107 foram classificadas corretamente, resultando em uma acurácia de 0,99 sendo este valor maior que o melhor trabalho encontrado na literatura atual, mesmo o único caso classificado erroneamente foi um falso positivo o que no contexto da aplicação é menos grave do que um falso negativo. Palavras-chave:Leucemia Linfoide Aguda,Processamento Imagens,Reconhecimento?? de??Padrões,Texturas,Classificadores Lineares.Abstract: Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is the most common type of cancer in childhood. Despite presenting a rapid evolution in its clinical condition, ALL has a relatively low mortality when identified and treated in its initial stage. Due to the fact that the ALL diagnosis is made by hematologists based on the microscopic analysis of the peripheral blood smear slices, which can be considered a tedious and tiring work, impacting on the doctor's performance, the development of tools that would help in this process is a real necessity. Thus, the purpose of this work is to present an algorithm capable of segmenting the existing leukocytes from blood smear images, extracting and selecting the most representative features, generating a compact representation, so as to finally use a classifier to differentiate the peripheral blood smear images of healthy patients from patients with ALL. The ALL_IDB image base was chosen for being a public domain base and also used in other works, thus allowing accurate comparisons, as well as revealing several difficulties that are faced when working with microscopic images, such as different types of lighting and distinct zoom levels. The final results were expressive and reached an accuracy of 0.99, where, from the 108 images used in the tests, 107 were classified correctly. This result is higher than the best one found in the latest literature, and the only image classified as being wrong was a false positive which in the application context is not the worse case scenario. Keywords: Acute Lymphoid Leukemia, Image??Processing, Pattern??Recognition,Textures, Linear Classifiers

Systematic segmentation method based on PCA of image hue features for white blood cell counting

Leukocyte (white blood cell, WBC) count is an essential factor that physicians use to diagnose infections and provide adequate treatment. Currently, WBC count is determined manually or semi-automatically, which often leads to miscounting. In this paper, we propose an automated method that uses a bioinspired segmentation mimicking the human perception of color. It is based on the claim that a person can locate WBCs in a blood smear image via the high chromatic contrast. First, by applying principal component analysis over RGB, HSV, and L*a*b* spaces, with specific combinations, pixels of leukocytes present high chromatic variance; this results in increased contrast with the average hue of the other blood smear elements. Second, chromaticity is processed as a feature, without separating hue components; this is different to most of the current automation that perform mathematical operations between hue components in an intuitive way. As a result of this systematic method, WBC recognition is computationally efficient, overlapping WBCs are separated, and the final count is more precise. In experiments with the ALL-IDB benchmark, the performance of the proposed segmentation was assessed by comparing the WBC from the processed images with the ground truth. Compared with previous methods, the proposed method achieved similar results in sensitivity and precision and approximately 0.2% higher specificity and 0.3% higher accuracy for pixel classification in the segmentation stage; as well, the counting results are similar to previous works

ALL classification using neural ensemble and memetic deep feature optimization

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is a fatal blood disorder characterized by the excessive proliferation of immature white blood cells, originating in the bone marrow. An effective prognosis and treatment of ALL calls for its accurate and timely detection. Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown promising results in digital pathology. However, they face challenges in classifying different subtypes of leukemia due to their subtle morphological differences. This study proposes an improved pipeline for binary detection and sub-type classification of ALL from blood smear images. At first, a customized, 88 layers deep CNN is proposed and trained using transfer learning along with GoogleNet CNN to create an ensemble of features. Furthermore, this study models the feature selection problem as a combinatorial optimization problem and proposes a memetic version of binary whale optimization algorithm, incorporating Differential Evolution-based local search method to enhance the exploration and exploitation of feature search space. The proposed approach is validated using publicly available standard datasets containing peripheral blood smear images of various classes of ALL. An overall best average accuracy of 99.15% is achieved for binary classification of ALL with an 85% decrease in the feature vector, together with 99% precision and 98.8% sensitivity. For B-ALL sub-type classification, the best accuracy of 98.69% is attained with 98.7% precision and 99.57% specificity. The proposed methodology shows better performance metrics as compared with several existing studies