Computer aided system for lymphoblast classification to detect acute lymphoblastic leukemia

Abstract

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is a disease that is detected by the presence of lymphoblast cell. Basically, lymphoblast cell is the abnormal cell of lymphocyte which is one of the White Blood Cell (WBC) types. Early prevention is suggested as this disease can be fatal and caused death. Traditionally, ALL is detected by using manual analysis which is challenging and time consuming. It can also yield inaccurate result as it is highly dependent on the pathologist’s skills. Industry has come out with hematology counter which is fast, accurate and automated. However, these machines are costly and cannot be afforded by some countries. For that reason, Computer Aided System (CAS) will be a great help to the pathologist for assisting purposes and it also can act as second opinion for the pathologist. This system contains six main steps which are color space correction, WBC segmentation, post processing, clumped area extraction, feature extraction and lymphoblast classification. Firstly, color space correction is apply by using l*a*b* color space to standardize the image’s intensity. Next, WBC segmentation is made to prune out WBC region using color space analysis with Otsu thresholding. However, segmented image contains noises that need to be eliminated and it is accomplished by applying morphological filter with Connected Component Labelling (CCL). There is an overlapping WBC which need to be separated by using Watershed method to extract the individual cells. Next, feature extraction is made to collect the cell’s data to be fed into the classifier. Classifier used in this system to classify lymphoblast is Support Vector Machine (SVM) and this system is able to achieve 96.69% of accuracy.