Acute lymphoblastic leukemia image segmentation based on modified HSV model

Abstract

Image segmentation is a critical step in computer-aided diagnosis that could speed up Leukemia detection. Leukemia is a cancer of the blood that has a reputation for being particularly lethal. Based on the immunohistochemical method, the leukocytes can be manually counted in a stained peripheral blood smear image to detect Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL). Regrettably, the manual diagnosis process takes about 3 to 24 hours to complete, which is insufficient. This paper introduced a new and straightforward ALL image segmentation approach based on color image transformation. First, Leukemia, ALL-IDB1, ALL-IDB2, and ALL image datasets were used in this paper. The Leukemia dataset includes 208 ALL-IDB1 and ALL-IDB2 images, while The ALL dataset has 3256 images. Next, we use the HSV model to transform ALL images. In addition, we modified the HSV model by pre-processing the saturation channel for better results. Then, the pre-processed images were segmented based on a fixed threshold. After that, various metrics are utilized to measure the output of the proposed method. Finally, the proposed methodology is compared to currently used benchmarks. The proposed method outperforms previous approaches regarding accuracy, specificity, sensitivity, and time. In addition, results show that the proposed technique improves performance measures significantly.