Nucleus segmentation technique for acute leukemia

Abstract

Leukemia is a disease that affects blood forming cells in the body. Early detection of the disease is necessary for proper treatment management. Abnormal white blood cells or blasts play important role for hematologists in their diagnostic process. Digital image processing technique could help them in their analysis and diagnosis by enhancing the visibility of the interested features of the WBC. In this paper, a global contrast stretching (GCS) and segmentation based on HSI (Hue, Saturation, Intensity) color space will be used to improve the image quality. Image enhancement is very important to increase the visual aspect of blast cells. The results show that the proposed image enhancement procedure is useful to extract the nucleus region in WBC images sample by using the same threshold value, for both ALL and AML images.