Using PCA and LVQ neural network for automatic recognition of five types of white blood cells

Designing an effective classifier has been a challenging task in the previous methods proposed in the literature. In this paper, we apply a combination of feature selection algorithm and neural network classifier in order to recognize five types of white blood cells in the peripheral blood. For this purpose, first nucleus and cytoplasm are segmented using Gram-Schmidt method and snake algorithm, respectively; second, three kinds of features are extracted from the segmented areas. Then the best features are selected using Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Finally, five types of white blood cells are classified using Learning Vector Quantization (LVQ) neural network. The performance analysis of the proposed algorithm is validated by an expert's classification results. The efficiency of the proposed algorithm is highlighted by comparing our results with those reported in a recent article which proposed a method based on the combination of Sequential Forward Selection (SFS) as the feature selection algorithm and Support Vector Machines (SVM) as the classifier.