Automated Identification of Plasma Cell in Bone Marrow Images

Mourtada Benazzouz (1) , Ismahan Baghli (1) , Mohammed Lamine Benomar (1) , Youcef Benmouna (1) , Mohammed Ammar (1)

1 GBM - Laboratoire Génie BioMédical [Tlemcen]

The classification and the count of different White Blood Cells (WBC) in microscopy images allow the assessment of a wide range of important hematology pathologies such Myeloma. This article aims particularly myeloma disease; this pathology is manifested by a proliferation of a type of cell called plasma cells. This paper presents a robust and accurate novel method for processing WBC(leukocyte) using a combination of ideas. The segmentation of cells is achieved in two phases, the first is to extract the nucleus from the green channel of the image using the otsu’s thresholding method, and the second operates through a region growing on the nucleus in order to delimitate a cytoplasm. After that, a cell’s characterization step is performed where desired features can be extracted in order to classify types of leukocytes and thus allow the counting of plasma cells. The proposed process have been successfully tested to a large number of images, showing promising results in terms of segmentation and classification of plasma cells, and also applied to varying cell appearance and image quality, encouraging future works.

Mots clés: cells segmentation; white blood cells; plasma cells; cells identification; bone marrow images

Domaines: Vision par ordinateur et reconnaissance de formes [cs.CV]; Imagerie médicale; Traitement des images [eess.IV]; Imagerie

Mourtada Benazzouz, Ismahan Baghli, Mohammed Lamine Benomar, Youcef Benmouna, Mohammed Ammar. Automated Identification of Plasma Cell in Bone Marrow Images . 2015. ⟨hal-01466770⟩