Review of leukocyte classification techniques for microscopic blood images

An automated system for leukocyte classification can make manual analysis of peripheral blood smear faster and less tedious task for a pathologist. Hematological disorders of leukocytes (white blood corpuscles) are very frequent in medical practices. Microscopic analysis of peripheral blood smear is a critical step in diagnosing the hematological disorders. However, the nonspecific nature of white cell with symptoms of Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) often leads to erroneous identification. Hence, the hematologists face difficulty to classify white blood cells. Light microscopic assessment is time consuming and inherently subjective, hence to avoid such problems an efficient computer aided classification technique for quantitative analysis of peripheral blood samples is required. This paper provides a review of computer-based classification techniques for leukocytes which have been effectively implemented by different researchers.