Detection of Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia using watershed transformation technique

Large number of diseases can be diagnosed by the counting and classification of blood cells. One type of the most common blood diseases is Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL). Rapid and uncontrolled growth of immature leukemic cells (also named as blast cells) is used to characterize ALL. The morphological analysis of the bone marrow and blood smear is the primary step of diagnosis. Valuable information is provided by the features extracted from the blood cells for the confirmation of the diagnosis. As the process have numerous drawbacks, a computerized system will be helpful for the analysis of stained microscopic images of the blood cells for quantitative examination. This paper demonstrates a new and simple segmentation approach using watershed transform and two simpler classification models to diagnose the presence of ALL in blood smear accurately.