Segmentación de agregados en imágenes de microscopía celular de eritrocitos empleando técnicas de procesamiento morfológico de imágenes

Abstract

Segmentation of microscopy images of blood smears is a source of some challenging digital image processing (DIP) tasks, among them that of segmenting erythrocyte aggregates (cells that are touching or overlapping). When addressing this problem, it is mandatory to make a good selection of an appropriate segmentation technique, capable of separating the aggregates in their constituent cells, despite the variability in morphological characteristics that they can exhibit. In this paper two alternatives are proposed and evaluated to segment erythrocyte aggregates, which combine the watershed and the distance transforms with minima imposition in the internal markers. The segmentation quality was evaluated by means of the Dice coefficient, calculated using manually segmented images as the groundtruth. The results obtained are illustrated through examples of the resulting images and shown quantitatively in tabulated form for the values of the Dice coefficient obtained. © 2013 Springer.