White blood cell segmentation for acute leukemia bone marrow images

Abstract

Morphological diagnosis of the blood and bone marrow smear under the microscope is an important preliminary step in the diagnosis of acute leukemia. The features and differential counts of the cells provide valuable information to the specialist to confirm the diagnosis and begin treatment, thus increasing the chance of survival of the patient. Manual diagnosis procedures are often tedious, labor intensive and time consuming. A computerised system can help accelerating the morphological diagnosis process. The proposed method consists of gradient magnitude, thresholding, morphological operations and watershed transform to perform cells segmentation. 50 images from subtypes M2, M5 and M6 were used to test the proposed method and the result showed that the method managed to obtain qualitatively good segmentation results. The segmentation accuracy for the tested image is 94.5% while the overage accuracies for the other subtypes are 94.58%, 95.06% and 95.65% respectively.