Leukocyte's nucleus segmentation using active contour in YCbCr colour space

Abstract

Blood cell segmentation is a crucial part of many medical and laboratory procedures such as cell counting and blood cell disorder diagnosis. Among different types of blood cells, white blood cells are the most important clinically, as they suffer greatest from blood disorders. In this paper we propose a method for automatic segmentation of white blood cells nucleus. A distinctive function is used in YCbCr color space to segment the white blood cells nucleus. Next, the sub-images are extracted which contain the whole body of white blood cell nucleus. Then an active contour method is applied to the sub-images extracted from the previous step to accurately segment the cell nucleus boundary. Our analysis conducted on 20 samples, show a great success on segmentation of white blood cells nucleus.