Modification of IDTCS Method for Touching Leukemia Cell Grouping

Morphological analysis and calculation of the number of white blood cells on microscopic images are stages in diagnosing leukemia. Constraints in developing a system for diagnosing leukemia are white blood cell segmentation and counting of the number single cells in touching cell. We propose to modify the Iterative Distance Transform For Convex Sets (IDTCS) method to separate the touching leukemia cells. The IDTCS method is used to determine markers for each cell in touching cells. The marker results from the IDTCS method are used as cell centroids and the next process is pixels clustering based on the nearest cell centroid using the euclidean distance function. The data used are microscopic images of Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL). The experimental results show that using modified IDTCS method for clustering produces better accuracy compared to the K-Means clustering and Watershed methods.