Unified approach for white blood cell segmentation, feature extraction, and counting using max-tree data structure

Abstract

Accurate identification and counting of White Blood Cells (WBCs) from microscopy blood cell images are vital for several blood-related disease diagnoses such as leukemia. The inevitability of automated cell image analysis in medical diagnosis results in a plethora of research for the last few decades. Microscopic blood cell image analysis involves three major steps: cell segmentation, classification, and counting. Several techniques have been employed separately to solve these three problems. In this paper, a simple unified model is proposed for White Blood Cell segmentation, feature extraction for classification, and counting with connected mathematical morphological operators implemented using the max-tree data structure. Max-tree creates a hierarchical representation of connected components of all possible gray levels present in an image in such a way that the root holds the connected components comprise of pixels with the lowest intensity value and the connected components comprise of pixels with the highest intensity value are in the leaves. Any associated attributes such as the size or shape of each connected component can be efficiently calculated on the fly and stored in this data structure. Utilizing this knowledge-rich data structure, we obtain a better segmentation of the cells that preserves the morphology of the cells and consequently obtain better accuracy in cell counting.