Dynamic programming for the segmentation of bone marrow cells

For the diagnosis of leukemia the morphological analysis of bone marrow is essential. This procedure is time consuming, partially subjective, error-prone and cumbersome. Moreover, repeated examinations may lead to intra- and inter-observer variances. Therefore, an automation of the bone marrow analysis is pursued. The automatic classification of bone marrow cells is highly dependent on the preceding segmentation of the nucleus and plasma parts of the cell. In this contribution we propose a dynamic programming approach for the segmentation of already localized bone marrow cells and evaluate the method with 1000 manually segmented cells. With this approach the segmentation quality for whole cells is 0.93 and 0.85 for the corresponding nucleus parts.