Machine Learning Techniques for Automatic Detection of Sickle Cell Anemia using Adaptive Thresholding and Contour-based Segmentation Method

Abstract

Automatic diagnosis of diseases in the medical field using image processing techniques has evolved tremendously in recent times. Sickle cell anemia (SCA) is a kind of disease connected with red blood cells (RBCs) present in the human body in which deformation of cells take place. The purpose of this work is to propose an automatic image processing technique for the detection of this disease from microscopic blood images. This paper mainly focuses on automatic detection of SCA using a novel segmentation method encompassing local adaptive thresholding and active contour-based algorithm. For the detection of sickle cells, supervised classifiers such as Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) are used. Here, geometric features of healthy and unhealthy RBCs are calculated and applied to these classifiers. In this approach, performance is found slightly greater in SVM classifier than the ANN classifier trained with scaled conjugate gradient back-propagation (BP) algorithm and with hidden layer of ten neurons. The proposed approach achieves a maximum of 99.2% accuracy with SVM classifier. The performance is also studied for seven different training algorithms in the ANN classifier by varying the numbers of hidden layer neurons. Comparative analysis of the performances of these algorithms shows that, resilient BP algorithm and 10 numbers of hidden neurons gave moderately better performance in ANN with 99% accuracy. ANN and SVM classifier with adaptive thresholding and active contour technique is an efficient approach for the classification of patients with SCA.