Human red blood cell recognition enhancement with three-dimensional morphological features obtained by digital holographic imaging

Keyvan Jaferzadeh, Inkyu Moon

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

26 Scopus citations

Abstract

The classification of erythrocytes plays an important role in the field of hematological diagnosis, specifically blood disorders. Since the biconcave shape of red blood cell (RBC) is altered during the different stages of hematological disorders, we believe that the three-dimensional (3-D) morphological features of erythrocyte provide better classification results than conventional two-dimensional (2-D) features. Therefore, we introduce a set of 3-D features related to the morphological and chemical properties of RBC profile and try to evaluate the discrimination power of these features against 2-D features with a neural network classifier. The 3-D features include erythrocyte surface area, volume, average cell thickness, sphericity index, sphericity coefficient and functionality factor, MCH and MCHSD, and two newly introduced features extracted from the ring section of RBC at the single-cell level. In contrast, the 2-D features are RBC projected surface area, perimeter, radius, elongation, and projected surface area to perimeter ratio. All features are obtained from images visualized by off-axis digital holographic microscopy with a numerical reconstruction algorithm, and four categories of biconcave (doughnut shape), flat-disc, stomatocyte, and echinospherocyte RBCs are interested. Our experimental results demonstrate that the 3-D features can be more useful in RBC classification than the 2-D features. Finally, we choose the best feature set of the 2-D and 3-D features by sequential forward feature selection technique, which yields better discrimination results. We believe that the final feature set evaluated with a neural network classification strategy can improve the RBC classification accuracy.

Original languageEnglish
Article number126015
JournalJournal of Biomedical Optics
Volume21
Issue number12
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Dec 2016

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Keywords

  • blood cell analysis
  • cell image analysis
  • digital holographic microscopy
  • red blood cell classification
  • three-dimensional image processing

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