Structural and textural classification of erythrocytes in anaemic cases: a scanning electron microscopic study.

The objective of this study is to address quantitative microscopic approach for automated screening of erythrocytes in anaemic cases using scanning electron microscopic (SEM) images of unstained blood cells. Erythrocytes were separated from blood samples and processed for SEM imaging. Thereafter, erythrocytes were segmented using marker controlled watershed transformation technique. Total 47 structural and textural features of erythrocytes were extracted using various mathematical measures for six types of anaemic cases as compared to the control group. These features were statistically evaluated at 1% level of significance and subsequently ranked using Fisher's F-statistic describing the group discriminating potentiality. Amongst all extracted features, twenty nine features were found to be statistically significant (p<0.001). Finally, Bayesian classifier was applied to classify six types of anaemia based on top seventeen ranked features those of which are of course statistically significant. The present study yielded a predictive accuracy of 88.99%.