Image enhancement technique using partial contrast stretching on abnormal Bone Marrow images for Leukemia screening

Abstract

Image Enhancement is a very useful pre-processing method that is implemented on biomedical images to eliminate poor contrast, thus improve interpretability for human’s vision. In Leukemia, the Bone Marrow generally makes a lot of abnormal White Blood Cells (WBCs) which do not function normally and do not die as they normally should. Leukemia can affects any five types of the WBCs; Neutrophils, Basophils, Eosinophils, Monocytes and Lymphocytes. In order to screen for Leukemia, the experts currently used a microscope to select the region of interest on bone marrow slide, detect the WBC, determined which class cell does the WBC belongs to based on his experience and knowledge and repeat the whole process until all cells in the region of interest are counted. This is a very tedious process even for an expert. Hence, a clear and clean image of Bone Marrow slide is firstly needed and preferred before the whole tiresome process takes place consecutively to avoid misinterpretation that might leads to misdiagnosis. In this paper, Partial Contrast Stretching has been implemented on images of Bone Marrow slides. The resulting images are enhanced to a better contrast compared to the original ones.