Recognition of acute lymphoblastic leukemia cells in microscopic images using k-means clustering and support vector machine classifier

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia is the most common form of pediatric cancer which is categorized into three L1, L2, and L3 and could be detected through screening of blood and bone marrow smears by pathologists. Due to being time-consuming and tediousness of the procedure, a computer-based system is acquired for convenient detection of Acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Microscopic images are acquired from blood and bone marrow smears of patients with Acute lymphoblastic leukemia and normal cases. After applying image preprocessing, cells nuclei are segmented by k-means algorithm. Then geometric and statistical features are extracted from nuclei and finally these cells are classified to cancerous and noncancerous cells by means of support vector machine classifier with 10-fold cross validation. These cells are also classified into their sub-types by multi-Support vector machine classifier. Classifier is evaluated by these parameters: Sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy which values for cancerous and noncancerous cells 98%, 95%, and 97%, respectively. These parameters are also used for evaluation of cell sub-types which values in mean 84.3%, 97.3%, and 95.6%, respectively. The results show that proposed algorithm could achieve an acceptable performance for the diagnosis of Acute lymphoblastic leukemia and its sub-types and can be used as an assistant diagnostic tool for pathologists.