Development and study of a method for cell separation during white blood cell segmentation on images of bone marrow preparations in information and measurement systems for diagnostics of acute leukemia

The issues of using of information and measurement systems based on processing of digital images of microscopic preparations for solving large-scale tasks of automating the diagnosis of acute leukemia are considered. The high density of leukocyte cells in the preparation (hypercellularity) is a feature of microscopic images of bone marrow preparations. It causes the proximity of cells to each other and their contact with the formation of conglomerates. Measuring of the characteristics of bone marrow cells in such conditions leads to unacceptable errors (more than 50%). The work is devoted to segmentation of contiguous cells in images of bone marrow preparations. A method of cell separation during white blood cell segmentation on images of bone marrow preparations under conditions of hypercellularity of the preparation has been developed. The peculiarity of the proposed method is the use of an approach to segmentation of cell images based on the watershed method with markers. Key stages of the method: the formation of initial markers and builds the lines of watershed, a threshold binarization, shading inside the outline. The parameters of the separation of contiguous cells are determined. The experiment confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed method. The relative segmentation error was 5 %. The use of the proposed method in information and measurement systems of computer microscopy for automated analysis of bone marrow preparations will help to improve the accuracy of diagnosis of acute leukemia.

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