Intra-nucleus mosaic pattern (InMop) and whole-cell Haralick combined-descriptor for identifying and characterizing acute leukemia blasts on single cell peripheral blood images.

Acute leukemia is usually diagnosed when a test of peripheral blood shows at least 20% of abnormal immature cells (blasts), a figure even lower in case of recurrent cytogenetic abnormalities. Blast identification is crucial for white blood cell (WBC) counting, which depends on both identifying the cell type and characterizing the cellular morphology, processes susceptible of inter- and intraobserver variability. The present work introduces an image combined-descriptor to detect blasts and determine their probable lineage. This strategy uses an intra-nucleus mosaic pattern (InMop) descriptor that captures subtle nuclei differences within WBCs, and Haralick's statistics which quantify the local structure of both nucleus and cytoplasm. The InMop captures WBC inner-nucleus structure by applying a multiscale Shearlet decomposition over a repetitive pattern (mosaic) of automatically-segmented nuclei. As a complement, Haralick's statistics characterize the local structure of the whole cell from an intensity co-occurrence matrix representation. Both InMoP and Haralick-based descriptors are calculated using the b-channel from Lab color-space. The combined-descriptor is assessed by differentiating blasts from nonleukemic cells with support vector machine (SVM) classifiers and different transformation kernels, in two public and independent databases. The first database-D1 (n = 260) is composed of healthy and acute lymphoid leukemia (ALL) single cell images, and second database-D2 contains acute myeloid leukemia (AML) blasts (n = 3294) and nonblast (n = 15,071) cell images. In a first experiment, blasts versus nonblast differentiation is performed by training with a subset of D2 (n = 6588) and testing in D1 (n = 260), obtaining a training AUC of 0.991 ± 0.002 and AUC = 0.782 for the independent validation. A second experiment automatically differentiates AML blasts (260 images from D2) from ALL blasts (260 images from D1), with an AUC of 0.93. In a third experiment, state-of-the-art strategies, VGG16 and RESNEXT convolutional neural networks (CNN), separate blast from nonblast cells in both databases. The VGG16 showed an AUC of 0.673 and the RESNEXT of 0.75. Reported metrics for all the experiments are area under the ROC curve (AUC), accuracy and F1-score.