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Bone Marrow Cells Detection: A Technique for the Microscopic Image Analysis

  • Image & Signal Processing
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Abstract

In the detection of myeloproliferative, the number of cells in each type of bone marrow cells (BMC) is an important parameter for the evaluation. In this study, we propose a new counting method, which consists of three modules including localization, segmentation and classification. The localization of BMC is achieved from a color transformation enhanced BMC sample image and stepwise averaging method. In the nucleus segmentation, both stepwise averaging method and Otsu’s method are applied to obtain a weighted threshold for segmenting the patch into nucleus and non-nucleus. In the cytoplasm segmentation, a color weakening transformation, an improved region growing method and the K-Means algorithm are employed. The connected cells with BMC will be separated by the marker-controlled watershed algorithm. The features will be extracted for the classification after the segmentation. In this study, the BMC are classified using the support vector machine into five classes; namely, neutrophilic split granulocyte, neutrophilic stab granulocyte, metarubricyte, mature lymphocytes and the outlier (all other cells not listed). Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves superior segmentation and classification performance with an average segmentation accuracy of 91.76% and an average recall rate of 87.49%. The comparison shows that the proposed segmentation and classification methods outperform the existing methods.

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Acknowledgements

The National Key R&D Program of China (Grant Nos. 2017YFC0112804) supported this work. The author would like to acknowledge Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University and Wuhan Landing Medical High-Tech Company, for providing the dataset.

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  1. School of Computer Science & Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan Shi, China

    Hong Liu, Haichao Cao & Enmin Song

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  1. Hong Liu
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  2. Haichao Cao
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Correspondence to Enmin Song.

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Liu, H., Cao, H. & Song, E. Bone Marrow Cells Detection: A Technique for the Microscopic Image Analysis. J Med Syst 43, 82 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-019-1185-9

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