Morphological Analysis for Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia Identification in Peripheral Blood Microscope Images Using ImageJ

Abstract

Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia (ALL) is a hematologic malignancy characterized by abnormal proliferation of immature lymphocytes in bone marrow and peripheral blood. Timely identification of blast-cell morphology in peripheral smear images can support early screening and reduce manual review burden. This paper presents an ImageJ-based morphological and chromatic analysis workflow for comparing healthy and leukemic blood-cell regions. The method extracts RGB-channel ratios and chromatic indices from nucleus, cytoplasm, RBC, and background regions, normalizes discriminative features, and computes a weighted $R_{\text{cellular }}$ score for exploratory component-level scoring. Experiments using ALL-IDB images show that green-to-red ratios, excess green-to-red, CIVE, and vegetation-index features provide measurable differences across nucleus, cytoplasm, RBC, and background states. The resulting rule-based workflow is lightweight, interpretable, and suitable for resource-constrained microscopy analysis, with diagnostic thresholds requiring independent calibration.