title: Automatic working area classification in peripheral blood smears without cell central zone extraction.
abstract: In this paper we study automatic classification of working areas in peripheral blood smears using image analysis and recognition methods. Such automatic classification can provide objective and reproducible quality control for the evaluation of smears and smear maker devices. However, research in this filed has drawn little attention. Existing methods either can not differentiate correctly different cell distributions or rely on the extraction of the central pallor zones in cells for counting, which are not always observable. In contrast, we do not rely on the pallor zone extraction thus on more general basis. We introduce two generic parameters to measure the goodness of working areas, one for the degree of overlap, and the other for the spatial occupancy. We also propose a cascading classification network for the classification of different areas. The effectiveness of our method has been tested on over 150 labeled images acquired from three malaria-infected Giemsa-stained blood smears using an oil immersion 100 x objective.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Infocomm Research, A-STAR, Singapore. wxiong@ I2R.a-star.edu.sg
authors.forename: W
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Xiong
authors.forename: J H
authors.initials: JH
authors.lastname: Lim
authors.forename: S H
authors.initials: SH
authors.lastname: Ong
authors.forename: N N
authors.initials: NN
authors.lastname: Tung
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: D
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Racoceanu
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Tan
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Chong
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Foong
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001331:Automation; D001399:Azure Stains / Q000494:pharmacology*; D001773:Blood Cells / Q000145:classification* / Q000166:cytology*; D003581:Cytodiagnosis / Q000379:methods*; D001330:Electronic Data Processing; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D015233:Models, Statistical; D010363:Pattern Recognition, Automated; D015203:Reproducibility of Results
chemical_list: D001399:Azure Stains