Leukocytes Classification and Segmentation in Microscopic Blood Smear: A Resource-Aware Healthcare Service in Smart Cities

Abstract

Smart cities are a future reality for municipalities around the world. Healthcare services play a vital role in the transformation of traditional cities into smart cities. In this paper, we present a ubiquitous and quality computer-aided blood analysis service for the detection and counting of white blood cells (WBCs) in blood samples. WBCs also called leukocytes or leucocytes are the cells of the immune system that are involved in protecting the body against both infectious disease and foreign invaders. Analysis of leukocytes provides valuable information to medical specialists, helping them in diagnosing different important hematic diseases, such as AIDS and blood cancer (Leukaemia). However, this task is prone to errors and can be time-consuming. A mobile-cloud-assisted detection and classification of leukocytes from blood smear images can enhance accuracy and speed up the detection of WBCs. In this paper, we propose a smartphone-based cloud-assisted resource aware framework for localization of WBCs within microscopic blood smear images using a trained multi-class ensemble classification mechanism in the cloud. In the proposed framework, nucleus is first segmented, followed by extraction of texture, statistical, and wavelet features. Finally, the detected WBCs are categorized into five classes: basophil, eosinophil, neutrophil, lymphocyte, and monocyte. Experimental results on numerous benchmark databases validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed system in comparison to the other state-of-the-art schemes.

Keywords

• Healthcare in smart cities
• haematology
• image classification
• image segmentation
• leukocytes classification
• mobile-cloud computing