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Effective identification and localization of immature precursors in bone marrow biopsy

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Abstract

Abnormal localization of immature precursors (ALIP) aggregating and clustering in bone marrow biopsy appears earlier than that of bone marrow smears in detection of the relapse of acute myelocytic leukemia (AML). But traditional manual ALIP recognition has many shortcomings such as prone to false alarms, neglect of distribution law before three immature precursor cells gathered, and qualitative analysis instead of quantitative one. So, it is very important to develop a novel automatic method to identify and localize immature precursor cells for computer-aided diagnosis, to disclose their patterns before ALIP with the development of AML. The contributions of this paper are as follows. (1) After preprocessing the image with Otsu method, we identify both precursor cells and trabecular bone by multiple morphological operations and thresholds. (2) We localize the precursors in different regions according to their distances with the nearest trabecular bone based on chamfer distance transform, followed by discussion for the presumptions and limitations of our method. The accuracy of recognition and localization is evaluated based on a comparison with visual evaluation by two blinded observers.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61340036,81170507 and 81101119) and National Key Basic Research Program (No. 2011CB707104).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Software Engineering Institute, East China Normal University, 3663 North Zhongshan Road, Shanghai, 200062, China

    Guitao Cao, Ling Li, Weiting Chen & Xuehua Liu

  2. Sixth People’s Hospital, Affiliated to Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 600 Yishan Road, Shanghai, 200233, China

    Yehua Yu & Jun Shi

  3. School of Information Science and Technology, East China Normal University, 500 Dongchuan Road, Shanghai, 200241, China

    Guixu Zhang

Authors
  1. Guitao Cao
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  2. Ling Li
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  3. Weiting Chen
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  4. Yehua Yu
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  5. Jun Shi
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  6. Guixu Zhang
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  7. Xuehua Liu
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Correspondence to Jun Shi or Guixu Zhang.

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Cao, G., Li, L., Chen, W. et al. Effective identification and localization of immature precursors in bone marrow biopsy. Med Biol Eng Comput 53, 215–226 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11517-014-1223-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11517-014-1223-1

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