The segmentation of leukocytes and their components acts as the foundation for all automated image-based hematological disease recognition systems. Perfection in image segmentation is a necessary condition for improving the diagnostic accuracy in automated cytology. Since the diagnostic information content of the segmented images is plentiful, suitable segmentation routines need to be developed for better disease recognition. Clustering is an essential image segmentation procedure which segments an image into desired regions. A judicious integration of rough sets and fuzzy sets is suitably employed towards leukocyte segmentation in a clustering framework. In this study, the goodness of fuzzy sets and rough sets is suitably integrated to achieve improved segmentation performance. The membership concept of fuzzy sets endow is efficient handling of overlapping partitions, and the rough sets provide a reasonable solution to deal with uncertainty, vagueness, and incompleteness in data. Such synergistic combination gives the proposed scheme an edge over standard cluster-based segmentation techniques, that is, K-means, K-medoid, fuzzy c-means, and rough c-means. Comparative analysis reveals that the hybrid rough fuzzy c-means algorithm is robust in segmenting stained blood microscopic images. The accomplished segmented nucleus and cytoplasm of a leukocyte can be used for feature extraction which leads to automated leukemia detection.
Pathological image analysis plays a significant role in effective disease diagnostics. Quantitative microscopy has supplemented clinicians with accurate results for diagnosis of dreaded diseases such as leukemia, hepatitis, AIDS, psoriasis. In this paper we present a texture based approach for automated leukemia detection. Acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL) is a malignant disease characterized by the accumulation of lymphoblast in the bone marrow. Texture features of the blood nucleus are investigated for diagnostic prediction of ALL. Other shape features are also extracted to classify a lymphocytic cell in the blood image into normal lymphocyte or lymphoblast (blasts). Initial segmentation is done using K-means clustering which segregates leukocytes or white blood cells (WBC) from other blood components i.e. erythrocytes and platelets. The results of K-means are used for evaluating individual cell shape, texture and other features for final detection of leukemia. A total of 108 blood smear images were considered for feature extraction and final performance evaluation is validated with the results of a hematologist.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.