An indeterminacy fusion of encoder-decoder network based on neutrosophic set for white blood cells segmentation

Abstract

Medical image analysis, particularly the segmentation of White Blood Cells (WBCs), holds critical importance in scrutinizing the quantity and morphology of these cells in smear images, a pivotal step in disease detection. Existing methodologies often fall short in differentiating between healthy and diseased WBCs, emphasizing color components over internal organizational nuances and external morphologies. This paper presents a pioneering contribution through the introduction of an encoder-decoder deep neural network with an indeterminacy fusion-based model explicitly designed for WBC extraction from blood images. In contrast to prior studies, our approach addresses the inadequacies by delving into the intricacies of WBC structure, characterizing object indeterminacy within the neutrosophic set domain. The encoder-decoder network is fortified by integrating WBC indeterminacy as a fusion component, enabling the segmentation of WBCs into distinct nucleus and cytoplasm regions. The efficacy of our methodology is evaluated across three datasets with varying resolutions. Quantitative metrics such as segmentation accuracy and intersection over union (IoU) are employed to assess the proposed network's performance, which consistently outperforms three original encoder-decoder networks. Notably, our model achieves commendable precision rates, with the highest mean segmentation accuracy reaching 0.95301 across the three datasets. These results underscore the enhanced performance of our segmentation network, attributing its success to the influential role of indeterminacy fusion in augmenting conventional segmentation methods. In summary, this work not only introduces a novel solution for WBC segmentation but establishes its superiority over existing methods. The interpretive insights gained from the results highlight the potential of indeterminacy fusion to drive advancements in the realm of medical image segmentation, emphasizing originality, significance, and superior performance metrics.