Extraction of karyocytes and their components from microscopic bone marrow images based on regional color features

Extracting karyocytes and their components from microscopic bone marrow images is prerequisite for computer-aided early diagnosis of hemopathy. Most existing methods assume all pixels belonging to a karyon region or a cytoplasm region have similar colors. Practically, the color of neither a karyon nor a cytoplasm in a microscopic image is homogeneous in the pixel level. Therefore, the regional color features of a region are emphasized in this paper. Based on this observation, we propose a novel method to karyocyte extraction that 9rst identi9es a karyon by 4-connected block growing from a karyon feature block, then identi9es feature blocks of its cytoplasm based on the extracted karyon, and 9nally extracts all cytoplasm regions by growing the cytoplasm feature blocks. Combining the karyon region and the corresponding cytoplasm regions can attain a complete karyocyte. Experimental results show that the proposed method is e:ective and robust. ? 2003 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.