Sequence of Simple Digital Technologies for Detection of Platelets in Medical Images

Platelets play an important role in the diagnosis and detection of various diseases, the course of the disease in the future, and the possibility of justifying treatment methods. In this aspect, platelet counting is of key importance. For these purposes, it is important to correctly identify such objects. This served as the basis for the development and generalization of an appropriate medical image analysis procedure. The purpose of this study is to construct a generalized procedure for platelet identification in medical digital images. The work examined at least 30 images containing objects such as platelets. These images are approximately the same type, but with different intensity of the presence of the main objects in the blood smear. Similar but noisy images are also considered. These images were noisy with different types of noise. Thus, a total of at least 120 images were examined. In general, this allows us to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed procedure for identifying platelets in medical images. This procedure includes simple methods of image analysis such as: binarization, morphological analysis, taking into account the influence of the sizes of different objects and comparative analysis of images at intermediate stages of the study. To summarize the results, estimates such as the percentage of false detection of platelets and the percentage of missed platelets were considered. The platelet identification results that were obtained for non-noisy images are as follows: false platelet isolation was less than 0.1%, missed platelets were within 2-2.5%. The worst result for noisy images is false platelet isolation – within 10% (for images with multiplicative noise), missed platelets – within 7.5-8% (for images with multiplicative noise). It should also be noted that noisy images are characterized by identification of platelets with distortion of their sizes: these sizes are reduced or increased. The percentage of such distortions does not exceed 1.3% (for images with Poisson noise).The problematic aspects of platelet identification in digital medical images are considered. Particular attention is paid to simple methods of digital image processing. Among the problematic aspects of the proposed approach there is a need to clearly take into account the geometric dimensions of platelets. The results obtained are acceptable and can be used as the basis for an automated blood smear analysis system.