Morphological, Texture, and Color Feature Analysis for Erythrocyte Classification in Thalassemia Cases

Abnormal erythrocytes have diverse shapes. The appearance of specific erythrocyte shapes in a person's blood can indicate certain diseases, including thalassemia. We used thalassemia peripheral blood smear images and applied a segmentation process to produce single erythrocyte sub-images. Each erythrocyte has a unique shape. The selection of appropriate features to represent erythrocytes is critical for classification accuracy. We used morphological features such as moment invariants, geometry parameters of the cell and central pallor, and distance angle signature (DAS) morphological features of the cell and central pallor. We combined morphological features with texture and color features to increase the accuracy of erythrocyte classification. In this study, the multi-layer perceptron is used to classify nine shapes of erythrocytes present in thalassemia cases. The experimental results of 7108 erythrocytes indicated an accuracy of 98.11 based on the combination of features. The experimental results also show that the combination of features we proposed produced higher classification accuracy than previous work, which yielded an accuracy of 93.77. © 2013 IEEE.