Sickle cell segmentation and classification for thalassemia aid diagnosis

Abstract

Background: Thalassemia is a hereditary blood disease in which abnormal red blood cells (RBCs) carry insufficient oxygen throughout the body. Conventional methods of thalassemia detection through a complete blood count (CBC) test and peripheral blood smear image still possess a lot of weaknesses. Methods: This paper proposes a hybrid segmentation method to segment the RBCs. It incorporates adaptive thresholding and canny edge method to segment the RBCs. Morphological operations are performed to clean the leftovers. Shape and texture features are extracted using the segmented masks and the gray level co-occurrence matrix. Data imbalance treatment is used for solving the imbalance cell type class in distribution. In the data resampling layer, the synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE), adaptive synthetic sampling (ADASYN), and random over sampling (ROS) are performed and evaluated using the decision tree and logistic regression. In the classification layer, the decision tree, random forest classifier and support vector machine (SVM) are assessed and compared for the best performance in classification. Results:The proposed method outperforms the other methods in the image segmentation layer with the structural similarity index measure (SSIM) of 89.88%. In the data resampling layer, ADASYN is employed as it is more accurate than the SMOTE and ROS. The random forest classifier is chosen at the classification layer as it is more accurate than the decision tree and support vector machine (SVM). Conclusions:The proposed method is tested on the latest dataset of erythrocyteIDB3 and it solves the issues of imbalanced data due to the insufficient cell classes.