Problem Background and Problem Statements

Leukemia is the cancer of the BM and the WBCs. Although leukemia is considered as a dangerous
type of cancer, the recent advances and development in the diagnostic tools and treatment options
have resulted in a cure rate of almost 70% (Priya Johnson, 2010). Generally speaking, there are
two types of leukemia; namely acute leukemia and chronic leukemia. Acute leukemia is clinically
and biologically different from chronic leukemia. Acute leukemia is characterized by its rapid and
aggressive proliferation of immature cells, namely, the blast cells. On the other hand, chronic
leukemia progresses slowly over the course of many years.

Most challenging and difficult problem due to the following reasons:

1. The complex nature of the cells presented in the PB slides (Liao & Deng, 2002). This complexity
comes from the diversity in cell shape, size and appearance. 10

2. Individual cell localization and extraction into a sub-image. Sub-images containing single
nucleus per image are essential for feature extraction (Mohapatra, 2011). Accurate cell localization
and extraction is affected by the indistinct boundaries between the cell of interest and the
background in many cases (Nee el at., 2012).

3. It is almost impossible to obtain the same imaging quality during the acquisition stage
(Markiewicz et al., 2005), as this is dependent on the different levels of illumination, lights,
staining procedure, and the proficiency of the laboratory staff who prepare the PB smear.

4. Adjacency and superimposition of cells. It is usually challenging to obtain satisfactory

segmentation results, especially during the separation of touching or overlapping cells (He & Liao,
2008).

Assuming that all the blast cells are segmented properly, it is a very important to extract proper
diagnostic features (Duda., et al, 2012) that describe the blasts through a numerical value. Blast
cells are classified as either lymphoid or myeloid based on these features. There are various
methods that can be used to generate features for acute leukemia classification. Usually, the
features come under three groups, namely, shape, texture, and color (Sinha & Ramakrishnan,
2003). Hundreds of features can be extracted from these three groups. However, not all of them
are useful for the classification process. Different blood cells could have similar feature values, for
instance, two different cells could have the same area size and thus giving no contribution to the
classification process. Thus, the key point is to determine the optimal set of discriminative features,
which may lead to the most efficient recognition results (Osowski et al., 2009).