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Subject: Re: Horn Detection in Leukaemia Images
Date: Tue, 17 Feb 2009 20:45:04 +0000 (UTC)
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This looks tricky.

How well is your current detection working?  And how automated do you need your analysis to be?  If your project is to develop an automated method, it looks difficult but interesting.  If your project is more concerned with using the results, a computer-assisted manual or semi-automated method might be a better option.

If you don't mind it being mostly manual, you could write something simple to allow you to click each horn / cell, leave a coloured marker there, then automatically count up the markers corresponding to each cell.  I suppose that wouldn't necessarily be much better than printing each image and using coloured pens, except that you could automate the processing of the results or save them.

Somewhat more advanced would be to click each cell, then use a region growing / marker controlled watershed segmentation method to find the interior of the cells.  I think at some point you will need a labeled image in which the interior of each cell has a separate label - only then can you use regionprops to do what Image Analyst describes.  You can also trace the perimeter coordinates and look for abrupt changes in direction to try to detect the horns occurring on the exterior, although they'll need to be distinguished from overlaps...

If you can solve these problems, the step to full automation is simplified to a matter of finding a good centre point so the user doesn't have to click.  But even without that analysis should be speeded up by a lot.

There are a lot of options, but the best one depends upon how deep into the problem you want to get...


"Lee Borland" <lborland01@qub.ac.uk> wrote in message <gnemko$pnv$1@fred.mathworks.com>...
> Hi all,
> 
> I have an interesting problem that is currently proving difficult to solve.
> 
> I have an image (http://i41.tinypic.com/10i71o2.jpg) containing leukaemia infected red blood cells. My task is to firstly detect and count the biconcave cells in my image, which I have done. The second is to detect the presence of horn like features (far left, bottom left). Following their detection, a count of the number of horns on each cell needs to be conducted.
> 
> Im struggling to complete this as the horns are all unique. Can anyone shed some light on this issue?
> 
> Thanks in advance for any help.

"Lee Borland" <lborland01@qub.ac.uk> wrote in message <gnemko$pnv$1@fred.mathworks.com>...
> Hi all,
> 
> I have an interesting problem that is currently proving difficult to solve.
> 
> I have an image (http://i41.tinypic.com/10i71o2.jpg) containing leukaemia infected red blood cells. My task is to firstly detect and count the biconcave cells in my image, which I have done. The second is to detect the presence of horn like features (far left, bottom left). Following their detection, a count of the number of horns on each cell needs to be conducted.
> 
> Im struggling to complete this as the horns are all unique. Can anyone shed some light on this issue?
> 
> Thanks in advance for any help.