Abnormal neutrophil nucleus lobation (like left shift and right shift) helps to diagnose for some clinical conditions. Currently, quantification of it depends on the manual microscopic inspection of blood smears by clinicians. The quality of the manual inspection is extremely limited by the efficiency of clinicians and their medical background. This article proposed an automatic lobe counting method based on the graph representation of the nucleus region skeletons. Skeletons of the segmented nucleus regions are computed by augmented Fast Marching Method and transformed into plane graphs. Then the nucleus lobes are split based on the extracted graph properties including width distribution along the skeleton and graph structure decomposition. Experiments show that the proposed method could efficiently approaches the real lobe numbers in blood smears and reliably distinguish the stabs from the segmented neutrophils, thus it should be helpful in automatic neutrophil lobe number quantification and abnormal lobation diagnosis. © 2012 International Society for Advancement of Cytometry

No abstract

Normalized Cross Correlation Operating (NCCO) between two binary images, template image and target image, is independent of their gray levels. Further more, providing the template is a binary image, the calculation results of NCCO should remain unrelated to the gray level of the template image. This paper proved the inference above and presented some methods to improve the pattern matching algorithms. These methods can be applied to the microscopic vision field, where the majority of images are low in their gray levels, approximating to three-value images, or even binary. Experimental results show that the characteristics of gray level unrelated to the NCCO can give guidance to designing template images, reducing time consumption of calculations, as well as improving positioning algorithm.

No abstract

No abstract