White blood cell segmentation by color-space-based k-means clustering

Sensors (Basel). 2014 Sep 1;14(9):16128-47. doi: 10.3390/s140916128.

Abstract

White blood cell (WBC) segmentation, which is important for cytometry, is a challenging issue because of the morphological diversity of WBCs and the complex and uncertain background of blood smear images. This paper proposes a novel method for the nucleus and cytoplasm segmentation of WBCs for cytometry. A color adjustment step was also introduced before segmentation. Color space decomposition and k-means clustering were combined for segmentation. A database including 300 microscopic blood smear images were used to evaluate the performance of our method. The proposed segmentation method achieves 95.7% and 91.3% overall accuracy for nucleus segmentation and cytoplasm segmentation, respectively. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can segment WBCs effectively with high accuracy.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Cluster Analysis
  • Color
  • Humans
  • Image Cytometry*
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted*
  • Leukocyte Count
  • Leukocytes / cytology*