Statistical Analysis of Features for Detecting Leukemia

Abstract

In this age of digital microscopy, image processing, statistical analysis, categorization, and systems for decision-making have become essential tools for medical diagnostics research. By visualizing and analyzing images, clinicians can identify anomalies in intracellular structure. Leukemia is a cancerous condition marked by an unregulated increase in aberrant white blood cells (WBCs). Recognizing acute leukemia tumor cells in blood smear images (BSI) is a challenging assignment. Image segmentation is regarded as the most significant step in the automated identification of this disease. The innovative concavity-based segmentation algorithm is employed in this study to segment WBC in sub-images from the ALLIDB2 database. The concave endpoints and elliptical features are used in the segmentation step of convex-shaped cell images. The procedure involves the extraction of contour evidence, which detects the visible section of each object, and contour estimation, which corresponds to the final object’s contours. Following the identification of the cells and their internal structure by concavity-based segmentation, the cells are categorized based on their morphological and statistical features. The method was evaluated using a public dataset meant to test classification and segmentation approaches. The statistical tool SPSS is used to independently check the significance of derived features. For classification, significant features are passed into machine learning techniques such as support vector machines (SVM), k-nearest neighbor (KNN), neural networks (NN), decision trees (DT), and Nave Bayes (NB). With an AUC of 98.9% and a total accuracy of 95%, the neural network model performed better. We advocate using the neural network model to identify acute leukemia cells based on its accuracy.