Automatic segmentation of blood cells from microscopic slides: A comparative analysis

With the recent developments in deep learning, automatic cell segmentation from images of microscopic examination slides seems to be a solved problem as recent methods have achieved comparable results on existing benchmark datasets. However, most of the existing cell segmentation benchmark datasets either contain a single cell type, few instances of the cells, not publicly available. Therefore, it is unclear whether the performance improvements can generalize on more diverse datasets. In this paper, we present a large and diverse cell segmentation dataset BBBC041Seg1, which consists both of uninfected cells (i.e., red blood cells/RBCs, leukocytes) and infected cells (i.e., gametocytes, rings, trophozoites, and schizonts). Additionally, all cell types do not have equal instances, which encourages researchers to develop algorithms for learning from imbalanced classes in a few shot learning paradigm. Furthermore, we conduct a comparative study using both classical rule-based and recent deep learning state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods for automatic cell segmentation and provide them as strong baselines. We believe the introduction of BBBC041Seg will promote future research towards clinically applicable cell segmentation methods from microscopic examinations, which can be later used for downstream tasks such as detecting hematological diseases (i.e., malaria).