Automated bone marrow cellularity determination

摘要

The invention determines cell to fat ratio statistic, applicable in the field of pathology, in a greatly improved manner over manual or prior art scoring techniques. The cellular areas are identified and displayed in an easy to read format on the computer monitor, printer output or other display means, with average cellularity, nuclear quantity distribution at a glance. These output data are an objective transformation of the subjective visible image that the pathologist or scientist relies upon for diagnosis, prognosis, or monitoring therapeutic perturbations. The invention uses multi-stage thresholding and segmentation algorithms in RGB and HSB spaces, auto-thresholding on red and blue channels in RGB to get the raw working image of all cells, then refines the working image with thresholding on hue and intensity channels in HSB using an adaptive parameter epsilon in entropy mode, and further separates different groups of cells within the same class, by auto-thresholding within the working image region.