School of Mechanical Engineering and Automation, Beihang University, Beijing, China.
Cytometry A. 2012 Sep;81(9):734-42. doi: 10.1002/cyto.a.22083. Epub 2012 Jul 11.
Abnormal neutrophil nucleus lobation (like left shift and right shift) helps to diagnose for some clinical conditions. Currently, quantification of it depends on the manual microscopic inspection of blood smears by clinicians. The quality of the manual inspection is extremely limited by the efficiency of clinicians and their medical background. This article proposed an automatic lobe counting method based on the graph representation of the nucleus region skeletons. Skeletons of the segmented nucleus regions are computed by augmented Fast Marching Method and transformed into plane graphs. Then the nucleus lobes are split based on the extracted graph properties including width distribution along the skeleton and graph structure decomposition. Experiments show that the proposed method could efficiently approaches the real lobe numbers in blood smears and reliably distinguish the stabs from the segmented neutrophils, thus it should be helpful in automatic neutrophil lobe number quantification and abnormal lobation diagnosis.
异常的中性粒细胞核叶分（如左移和右移）有助于诊断某些临床情况。目前，对其的定量依赖于临床医生对血涂片的手动显微镜检查。手动检查的质量受到临床医生的效率和他们的医学背景的极大限制。本文提出了一种基于细胞核区域骨架图形表示的自动叶计数方法。通过增强型快速行进方法计算分割细胞核区域的骨架，并将其转换为平面图形。然后根据提取的图形属性（包括骨架上的宽度分布和图形结构分解）对细胞核叶进行分割。实验表明，该方法可以有效地接近血涂片的真实叶数，并可靠地区分刺和已分割的中性粒细胞，因此它应该有助于中性粒细胞叶数的自动定量和异常叶分的诊断。
