title: Characterization and automatic screening of reactive and abnormal neoplastic B lymphoid cells from peripheral blood.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  The objective was to advance in the automatic, image-based, characterization and recognition of a heterogeneous set of lymphoid cells from peripheral blood, including normal, reactive, and five groups of abnormal lymphocytes: hairy cells, mantle cells, follicular lymphoma, chronic lymphocytic leukemia, and prolymphocytes.
  
  
  METHODS
  A number of 4389 images from 105 patients were selected by pathologists, based on morphologic visual appearance, from patients whose diagnosis was confirmed by all the remaining complementary tests. Besides geometry, new color and texture features were extracted using six alternative color spaces to obtain rich information to characterize the cell groups. The recognition system was designed using support vector machines trained with the whole image set.
  
  
  RESULTS
  In the experimental tests, individual sets of images from 21 new patients were analyzed by the trained recognition system and compared with the true diagnosis. An overall recognition accuracy of 97.67% was achieved when the cell screening was performed into three groups: normal lymphocytes, abnormal lymphoid cells, and reactive lymphocytes. The accuracy of the whole experimental study was 91.23% when considering the further discrimination of the abnormal lymphoid cells into the specific five groups.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The excellent automatic screening of the three groups of normal, reactive, and abnormal lymphocytes is useful as it discriminates between malignancy and not malignancy. The discrimination of the five groups of abnormal lymphoid cells is encouraging toward the idea that the system could be an automated image-based screening method to identify blood involvement by a variety of B lymphomas.
authors.affiliation: Matematica Aplicada III, Technical University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain.
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Alférez
authors.affiliation: Department of Hemotherapy-Hemostasis, Hospital Clinic, Barcelona, Spain.
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Merino
authors.affiliation: Matematica Aplicada III, Technical University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain.|Department of Hemotherapy-Hemostasis, Hospital Clinic, Barcelona, Spain.
authors.forename: L
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Bigorra
authors.affiliation: Matematica Aplicada III, Technical University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain.
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Rodellar
mesh_terms: D001402:B-Lymphocytes / Q000378:metabolism / Q000473:pathology*; D015415:Biomarkers; D006801:Humans; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; D016130:Immunophenotyping / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods; D015451:Leukemia, Lymphocytic, Chronic, B-Cell / Q000097:blood* / Q000175:diagnosis*; D061848:Optical Imaging / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods; D010641:Phenotype
chemical_list: D015415:Biomarkers
keywords: Abnormal lymphoid cells; automatic cell classification; blood cells; digital image processing; morphologic analysis; peripheral blood