White Blood Cells Identification and Classification from Leukemic Blood Image

PUTZU, LORENZO;DI RUBERTO, CECILIA

2013-01-01

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Abstract

The counting and classification of blood cells allows the evaluation and diagnosis of a vast number of diseases. Through the analysis of white blood cells (WBCs) the ALL - Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia, a blood cancer that can be fatal if left untreated, can be detected. Nowadays the morphological analysis of blood cells is performed manually by skilled operators. This involves numerous drawbacks, such as slowness of the analysis and a non-standard accuracy, dependent on the operator skills. In literature there are only few examples of automated systems in order to analyze and classify the blood cells, most of which only partial. This paper presents a complete and fully automatic method for WBCs identification and classification from microscopic images. The proposed method firstly individuates WBCs from which, subsequently, are extracted morphological features necessary for thefinal stage of classification. The whole work has been developed using MATLAB environment.