Abstract
Microscopic image analysis plays a significant role in initial leukemia screening and its efficient diagnostics. Since the present conventional methodologies partly rely on manual examination, which is time consuming and depends greatly on the experience of domain experts, automated leukemia detection opens up new possibilities to minimize human intervention and provide more accurate clinical information. This paper proposes a novel approach based on conventional digital image processing techniques and machine learning algorithms to automatically identify acute lymphoblastic leukemia from peripheral blood smear images. To overcome the greatest challenges in the segmentation phase, we implemented extensive pre-processing and introduced a three-phase filtration algorithm to achieve the best segmentation results. Moreover, sixteen robust features were extracted from the images in the way that hematological experts do, which significantly increased the capability of the classifiers to recognize leukemic cells in microscopic images. To perform the classification, we applied two traditional machine learning classifiers, the artificial neural network and the support vector machine. Both methods reached a specificity of 95.31%, and the sensitivity of the support vector machine and artificial neural network reached 98.25 and 100%, respectively.
Highlights
Leukemia is a term describing a group of hematological malignancies that are manifested by the tumourous proliferation or increased life span of immature white blood cells (WBCs) in the bone marrow (American Dental Association [ADA], 2012)
We propose a method for the automated identification and classification of blast cells from microscopic peripheral blood smear images
This study introduces a novel combination of image processing methodologies and proposes extensive pre-processing to achieve high classification accuracy
Summary
Leukemia is a term describing a group of hematological malignancies that are manifested by the tumourous proliferation or increased life span of immature white blood cells (WBCs) in the bone marrow (American Dental Association [ADA], 2012). Leukocytes are highly differentiated for their specialized functions, and they play an essential role in the immune system (Rogers, 2011). The malignancy of this disease varies from non-malignant to highly aggressive forms, and the immature cells are not able to fulfill their normal function (Serfontein, 2011). Whereas the acute form of leukemia develops quickly and the number of leukemic cells increases
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