title: Segmentation of leukocytes and erythrocytes in blood smear images.
abstract: Differential blood count is a standard method in hematological laboratory diagnosis. In the course of developing a computer-assisted microscopy system for the generation of differential blood counts, the detection and segmentation of white and red blood cells forms an essential step and its exactness is a fundamental prerequisite for the effectiveness of the subsequent classification step. We propose a method for the exact segmentation of leukocytes and erythrocytes in a simultaneous and cooperative way. We combine pixel-wise classification with template matching to locate erythrocytes and use a level-set approach in order to get the exact cell contours of leukocyte nucleus and plasma regions as well as erythrocyte regions. An evaluation comparing the performance of the algorithm to the manual segmentation performed by several persons yielded good results.
authors.affiliation: Image Processing and Medical Engineering Department, Fraunhofer-Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS, Erlangen, Germany. Tobias.Bergen@iis.fraunhofer.de
authors.forename: Tobias
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Bergen
authors.forename: Dirk
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Steckhan
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Wittenberg
authors.forename: Thorsten
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Zerfass
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001772:Blood Cell Count / Q000379:methods*; D001853:Bone Marrow / Q000473:pathology; D002467:Cell Nucleus / Q000378:metabolism; D002624:Chemistry, Clinical / Q000379:methods; D004906:Erythrocyte Count / Q000379:methods*; D004912:Erythrocytes / Q000166:cytology*; D006801:Humans; D007089:Image Enhancement / Q000379:methods; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D007958:Leukocyte Count / Q000379:methods*; D007962:Leukocytes / Q000166:cytology*; D015233:Models, Statistical; D010363:Pattern Recognition, Automated / Q000379:methods; D015203:Reproducibility of Results