Abstract
Anemia is a common public health disease diffused worldwide. In many cases it affects the daily lives of patients needing medical assistance and continuous monitoring. Medical literature states empirical evidence of a correlation between conjunctival pallor on physical examinations and its association with anemia diagnosis. Although humans exhibit a natural expertise in pattern recognition and associative skills based on hue properties, the variance of estimates is high, requiring blood sampling even for monitoring. To design automatic systems for the objective evaluation of pallor utilizing digital images of the conjunctiva, it is necessary to obtain reliable automatic segmentation of the eyelid conjunctiva. In this study, we propose a graph partitioning segmentation approach. The semantic segmentation procedure of a diagnostically meaningful region of interest has been proposed for exploiting normalized cuts for perceptual grouping, thereby introducing a bias towards spectrophotometry features of hemoglobin. The reliability of the identification of the region of interest is demonstrated both with standard metrics and by measuring the correlation between the color of the ROI and the hemoglobin level based on 94 samples distributed in relation to age, sex and hemoglobin concentration. The region of interest automatically segmented is suitable for diagnostic procedures based on quantitative hemoglobin estimation of exposed tissues of the conjunctiva.
Highlights
Diagnosing anemia requires in most cases a complete blood count (CBC) to check different properties, including hemoglobin and hematocrit levels
We evaluated both spatial and color properties of regions of interest by assessing the most suitable metrics based on this specific medical image segmentation problem [49]
The ROIs extracted by the model underwent an in-depth quantitative comparison with ground truth, using state of the art metrics for similarity and Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC) between the a* component from CIELAB space and hemoglobin values
Summary
Anemia is a blood disorder in which the number of red blood cells is inadequate to carry oxygen to human tissues and organs. It affects about a third of the global population, being the most common blood disorder according to the epidemiological results [1,2,3]. Adequate production of red blood cells prevents conditions such as anemia and tissue hypoxia. Anemia caused by deficiencies of the aforementioned factors results in production patterns of abnormal and different erythrocytes [5]. Diagnosing anemia requires in most cases a complete blood count (CBC) to check different properties, including hemoglobin and hematocrit levels. Each physiological need depends on several factors, such as gender, age, different stages of Electronics 2020, 9, 997; doi:10.3390/electronics9060997 www.mdpi.com/journal/electronics
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