Segmentation of haematopoeitic cells in bone marrow using circle detection and splitting techniques

Bone marrow evaluation is indicated when peripheral blood abnormalities are not explained by clinical, physical, or laboratory findings. In this paper, we propose a novel method for segmentation of haematopoietic cells in the bone marrow from scanned slide images. Segmentation of clumped cells is a challenging problem for this application. We first use color information and morphology to eliminate red blood cells and the background. Clumped haematopoietic cells are then segmented using circle detection and a splitting algorithm based on the detected circle centers. The Hough Transform is used for circle detection and to find the number and positions of circle centers in each region. The splitting algorithm is based on detecting the maximum curvature points, and partitioning them based on information obtained from the centers of the circles in each region. The performance of the segmentation algorithm for haematopoietic cells is evaluated by comparing our proposed method with a hematologist´s visual segmentation in a set of 3748 cells.