Extraction of Nucleolus Candidate Zone in White Blood Cells of Peripheral Blood Smear Images Using Curvelet Transform.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine Volume 2012, Article ID 574184, 12 pages doi:10.1155/2012/574184 Research Article Extraction of Nucleolus Candidate Zone in White Blood Cells of Peripheral Blood Smear Images Using Curvelet Transform Ramin Soltanzadeh,1 Hossein Rabbani,1 and Ardeshir Talebi2 1 Biomedical Engineering Department, Medical Image and Signal Processing Research Center, Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Isfahan, Iran 2 Department of Pathology, School of Medicine, Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Isfahan, Iran Correspondence should be addressed to Hossein Rabbani, h rabbani@med.mui.ac.ir Received 5 December 2011; Revised 8 February 2012; Accepted 11 February 2012 Academic Editor: Bill Crum Copyright © 2012 Ramin Soltanzadeh et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The main part of each white blood cell (WBC) is its nucleus which contains chromosomes. Although white blood cells (WBCs) with giant nuclei are the main symptom of leukemia, they are not sufficient to prove this disease and other symptoms must be investigated. For example another important symptom of leukemia is the existence of nucleolus in nucleus. The nucleus contains chromatin and a structure called the nucleolus. Chromatin is DNA in its active form while nucleolus is composed of protein and RNA, which are usually inactive. In this paper, to diagnose this symptom and in order to discriminate between nucleoli and chro- matins, we employ curvelet transform, which is a multiresolution transform for detecting 2D singularities in images. For this reason,