Classification of White Blood Cell Using Adaptive Active Contour

  • Theerapattanakul, J. (Research Center for Communication and Information Technology (ReCCIT), and Department of Electronics, Faculty of Engineering, King Mongkut's Institute of Technology Ladkrabang) ;
  • Plodpai, J. (Research Center for Communication and Information Technology (ReCCIT), and Department of Electronics, Faculty of Engineering,) ;
  • Mooyen, S. (Department of Physical Apply and Medical Instrumentation King Mongkut's Institute of Technology North Bangkok) ;
  • Pintavirooj, C. (Research Center for Communication and Information Technology (ReCCIT), and Department of Electronics, Faculty of Engineering,)
  • Published : 2004.08.25

Abstract

The differential white blood cell count plays an important role in the diagnosis of different diseases. It is a tedious task to count these classes of cell manually. An automatic counter using computer vision helps to perform this medical test rapidly and accurately. Most commercial-available automatic white blood cell analysis composed mainly 3 steps including segmentation, feature extraction and classification. In this paper we concentrate on the first step in automatic white-blood-cell analysis by proposing a segmentation scheme that utilizes a benefit of active contour. Specifically, the binary image is obtained by thresolding of the input blood smear image. The initial shape of active is then placed roughly inside the white blood cell and allowed to grow to fit the shape of individual white blood cell. The white blood cell is then separated using the extracted contour. The force that drives the active contour is the combination of gradient vector flow force and balloon force. Our purposed technique can handle very promising to separate the remaining red blood cells.

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