A Method of Quantitative Analysis for Dynamic Cellular Morphological Change

In recent years, with the advancement of microscopic imaging technique, cellular morphological analysis has become one of the most important branches of biomedical image processing field. Cell image analysis, an assisting method of clinical information acquisition, has played an important role in facilitating the appropriate diagnosis and treatment against some serious diseases such as cancer, leukemia and etc. Early studies of this field focuses on still image information and mainly concerns either cell counting or the morphological characteristics of cell image. Furthermore, much effort has been devoted to analyzing the morphological change of cell image qualitatively, while less attention has been paid to analyzing it quantitatively which in fact is more effective, objective and accurate. Under this very circumstances, our work concentrates on analyzing the cellular morphological change by means of quantitative measurement, and a new method-circumference radial difference (Rd_c) is proposed. The basic idea is to measure the morphological change by estimating the radial differences from 360 different angles. Two sets of lymphocyte video database provided by the cooperation hospital are used to verify the proposed approach. Experimental results show that the proposed (Rd_c) measurement can produce reasonably good agreement with subjective judgment by people.