International Conference on Communication and Signal Processing, April 3-5, 2014, India

Detection of Leukemia in Microscopic Images Using

Image Processing
Chaitali Raje, Jyoti Rangole

Abstract-Leukemia occurs when lot of abnormal white blood cells Leukemia is a cancer that involves the blood-forming
produced by the bone marrow. Hematologist makes use of tissues of the bone marrow, spleen and lymph nodes. It is
microscopic study of human blood, which leads to need of characterized by an uncontrolled production of immature
methods, including microscopic color imaging, segmentation,
blood cells.
classification and clustering that can allow identification of
patients suffering from Leukemia. The microscopic images will
be inspected visually by hematologists and the process is time
consuming and tiring. The automatic image processing system is
urgently needed and can overcome related constraints in visual
inspection.The proposed system will be on microscopic images to
detect Leukemia. The early and fast identification of Leukemia
greatly aids in providing the appropriate treatment. Initial
segmentation is done using Statistical parameters such as mean,
standard deviation which segregates white blood cells from other
blood components i.e. erythrocytes and platelets. Geometrical
features such as area, perimeter of the white blood cell nucleusis
investigated for diagnostic prediction of Leukemia. The proposed
method is successfully applied to a large number of images,
showing promising results for varying image quality.Different
image processing algorithms such as Image Enhancement,
Thresholding, Mathematical morphology and Labelling are
implemented using LabVIEW and MATLAB.

Fig.! Production of blood cells.

Keywords- Leukemia, Image processing, Labview and Matlab.

The bone marrow is the site where lymphocytes and other

I. INTRODUCTION
blood cells are made. It is a spongy tissue found inside many
large bones of the body. The bone marrow produces three
T
HE most important part of any human body is blood
as it keeps one alive. It performs many important types of blood cells: RBCs contain hemoglobin and carry
functions such as to transfer oxygen, carbon dioxide, mineral oxygen and other materials to the tissues throughout the body;
and etc. to the whole body in order to maintain metabolism. Platelets help to form clots; WBCs help fight off infections in
Blood consists of three main components which RBC, WBC the body. When a person has leukemia, the bone marrow does
and Platelets[I]. not work properly. The bone marrow produces abnormal,
Insufficient amount of the blood could affect the immature cells, called leukemia cells. Leukemia cells are
metabolism greatly which could be very dangerous if early mostly referred to as "blasts". These immature cancer cells
treatment is not taken. One of the common blood disorders is crowd out other blood-forming cells in the bone marrow. If a
Leukemia. Leukemia is the common type of cancer in bone marrow is not able to make enough RBCs to carry
children. All cancers begin in body cells , and leukemia is a oxygen, the child may develop anemia, and feel very tired. If
cancer that begins in blood cells. Generally, cells grow and sufficient platelets are not produced, the blood will not clot
multiply to form new cells as the body needs them. When cells properly, and the patient may bleed easily. When WBCs are
grow old, they die and new cells take their place. not plentiful enough, the body cannot fight off germs and the
Sometimes,this cycle does not work correctly. In cancer, new person may develop a frequent infection.Leukemia can be
cells are formed when the body does not need them, and old either acute or chronic in type[l].
cells do not die when they should[l ]. The paper is organized as follows: section II consists of
literature survey, section III describes proposed method,
section IV contains results and discussion and section V is
conclusion.

II. LITERATU RE SURVEY

Chaitali Raje is with the Electronics and Telecommunication Department,
Vidya Pratishthan's College of Engineering, Baramati, Dist: Pune-413133, The diagnosis of leukemia frequently followes a routine
University of Pune, MS, India. (e-mail: sonyrajeI6@gmail.com).
blood test that results in an abnormal blood cell count. Once
Jyoti Rangole is with the Electronics and Telecommunication Department,
Vidya Pratishthan's College of Engineering, Baramati, Dist: Pune-413133, leukemia is suspected, the doctor may take samples of bone
University of Pune, MS, India. (e-mail: jyotika2kI@gmail.com). marrow and blood to examine cell shape. Samples are also

978-1-4799-3358-7114/$31.00 ©2014 IEEE +-IEEE

Advancing Technology
for Humanity

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 sent to the pathology lab to identify proteins located on the analysis. Changes in these features will be used as a
surface and chromosomal and changes. This information is classifier input.
important for diagnosis of individual patients. 5. Lim Huey Nee, et al.[6]In this paper, the gradient
magnitude, Thresholding, morphological operations and
2.1 Existing Methods for Diagnosis watershed transform to perform cell segmentation is
done. 50 images were used to test the proposed method
1. Medical history and physical examination: The and the result showed that the method managed to
record of present symptoms, and problems a person obtain qualitatively good segmentation results.
has had in the past. The medical history of a person's 6. N.H. Abed Halim, et al.[7] In this paper, a global
family also helps in diagnose leukemia. contrast stretching and segmentation based on HIS
2. Complete blood count (CBC): Blood is taken and color space is used to improve the image quality. Image
checked under the microscope for the number of enhancement procedure is used to extract the nucleus
RBCs, WBCs and platelets. region in the WBC image sample by using same
3. Bone marrow aspiration: Bone marrow is removed threshold value, for both ALL and AML images.
with the help of a needle from breastbone. The 7. Ruggero Donida Labati, et al.[8] In this paper, they
removed sample is observed under a microscope to proposed a new public dataset of blood samples,
look for abnormal cells. specifically designed for the evaluation and the
4. Cytogenetic analysis: Cytogenetic test takes blood comparison of algorithms for segmentation and
or bone marrow to help identify individual classification. For each image in the dataset, the
chromosomes. It shows abnormalities in classification of the cells is given, as well as a specific
chromosomes, which help to diagnosis and identify set of figures of merits to fairly compare the
the type of leukemia. Results are usually available performances of different algorithms. The number of
within 3 weeks. counting blood cells will then be used to calculate the
5. Immunohistochemistry: Blood sample of cells are ratio of blood cells for leukemia detection.
treated with special antibodies in
immunohistochemistry. U nder the microscope the
change in color can be seen. It helps in determining III.PROPOSED METHOD
the types of cells that are present.
From the literature survey, it is found that typical steps for
automatic leukemia cell detection are as in Figure 2.
2.2 Image processing techniques

1. Hossein Ghayoumi Zadeh, et al.[2] In this work, an

image analysis approach for automated detection,
Image Image pre- Image
• •
preprocessing- smoothing, enhancement, segmentation,
feature extraction- morphological and calorimetric and acquisition processing segmentation

then detection and classification of particular cells,

especially the cancer cells from normal cells is done.
•
2. Minai D. Joshi, et al.[3] This paper has proposed
automatic Otsu's Thresholding for blood cell Detection of Feature
segmentation method along with image enhancement cells • extraction
and arithmetic for WBC segmentation. K-NN classifier
has been utilized to classify blast cells from normal
lymphocyte cells.
3. N.Z. Supardi, et al. [4] This paper presents the study on
blasts classifying in acute leukemia into two major Fig.2 Typical steps for automatic leukemia cell detection
forms which are ALL and AML by using K-NN. 12
main features that represent size, color-based and shape
were extracted from blood images. The k values and
distance metric of k-NN were tested inorder to find A. Nucleus segmentation - using Labview
suitable parameters to be applied in the method of
classifying the blasts. The quality of the microscopic image depends on the
4. Fauziah Kasmin, et al.[5] This paper describes a exposure of the microscope staining process. Over and
preliminary study of developing a detection of leukemia under exposure setting may cause difficulty in detection.

types using microscopic blood sample images. It will Image enhancement processes consist of a collection of

use features in microscopic images and examine techniques that attempt to convert the image into the

changes in texture, geometry, color and statistical form better suited for analysis by human or machine.

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 The algorithm used to develop the nucleus segmentation
technique is as follows:

Stepl: Input the color blood slide image to the

system.
Step2: Convert the color image into grayscale
image.
Step3: Enhance contrast of the grayscale image by
using histogram equalization method.
Step4: Calculate the statistical parameters such as
the mean and standard deviation of the
image
StepS:Calculate the average values of mean and
standard deviation.
Step6: Apply multi-threshold method of keeping Fig.3 Block diagram
standard deviation as a lower limit, mean as
middle limit and 255 as the upper limit of
threshold.
Step7: To remove small pixel groups use
morphological erosion.
Step8: Apply sobel edge detector.
Step9: Calculate the geometrical features such as
area and perimeter of segmented cells.
SteplO: Based on the features extracted in above
step, classify cell as blast or normal cell.

B. Nucleus segmentation - using Matlab [51

Stepl:Input the color blood slide image to the

system.
Step2: Convert the color image into grayscale, so
that the nucleus part of the cell will appear
as the darkest part of the image.
Step3: Perform linear contrast enhancement(L) and
Histogram equalization(H).
Step4: Perform A1:addition of L and H.
StepS: Perform A2: subtraction of L and H.
Step6: Perform A3:addition of Al and A2.
Step7: Apply Otsu's Thresholding.
Step8: Apply removal of small particles and Sobel
Fig.4 Front panel
edge detection.
Step9: Feature extraction.
In the second algorithm, nucleus segmentation using
SteplO: Classification of cell.
Matlab, all the images are converted into grayscale images so
that the nucleus part of the cell will become the darkest part of
the image.

IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

In the algorithm of nucleus segmentation using Labview

the image is enhanced using histogram equalization method
and nucleus segmentation of enhanced image is done using
statistical parameters such as mean and standard deviation.
The proposed technique has been applied on 128 microscopic
blood slide images. Fig. 3 and 4 represent the block diagram
and front panel of Labview.
In the result, geometrical features such as area and
perimeter of each cell are calculated. Depending on the
Fig. (a) Grayscale Image
feature values cell is classified into blast or normal cell.

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 Fig. (b) Linear Contrast (L) Fig. (t) A3: addition of AI and A2

The experiment shows how contrast stretching such as,

linear contrast stretching and histogram equalization can be
combined together with the use of image arithmetic operations
to remove most of the details in the image like RBCs and
other parts of the WBC and retain only the nucleus of the
white blood cell as shown in Fig. ( a)-(t). It also shows how
filtering can improve the segmentation result by making the
nucleus darker so it can be easily detected by the threshold as
shown in Fig. ( g)-(i).

Fig. (g) Otsu's Thresholding

V. CONCLUSION

The main aim of this paper is nucleus segmentation

followed by feature extraction to detect Leukemia. Shape
features of nuclei such as area, perimeter, etc. are considered
for better accuracy of detection.The results show that the
proposed statistical parameter such as mean and standard
deviation based image segmentation and Otsu's thresholding
based produced good segmentation performance. In addition,
the fully segmented nucleus can be better achieved by using

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LabVIEW based algorithm because it is less sensitive to input
image variations.

REFERENCE

[1] www.connectedkansankids.comldiagnoses/leukemia.html
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Classification of the Cancer Cells by Using Image Processing and
LabVIEW," International journal of Theory and Engineering, Vol. 5,
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segmentation and classification to detect acute leukemia", International
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[4] N. Z. Supardi. M. Y. Masher. N. H. Harun. F. A. Bakri, R. Hassan,
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