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Digital WHO Hemoglobin Color Scale: Analysis and Performance

Authors:
Rajendra Kumar M.
Hemant Misra
Sujit Hiwale
Manjunath Ramachandra

Keywords: hemoglobin estimation; color image analysis; WHO HCS; nearest neighbor

Abstract:
Anemia is a public health problem that affects populations in both rich and poor countries. The World Health Organization recommends hemoglobin (Hb) color scale (HCS) to estimate the level of Hb in low resource settings where lab facilities are not available. Our aim is to investigate if the subjectivity associated with the use of HCS in estimating Hb level can be reduced by image processing techniques. It is proposed to take an image of a drop of blood under controlled conditions and then estimate the Hb value of the blood using an image processing algorithm trained on HCS. In the first part of the paper, the protocol for taking the images by a camera is standardized and established. In the second part of the paper, on a set of 20 healthy volunteers, the Hb value of their blood is estimated by the proposed method and compared with their reference Hb value. The correlation between the estimated Hb values and reference Hb values is 0.8. This result on a small dataset is encouraging and shows that color image analysis of blood can be used to estimate Hb.

Pages: 53 to 58

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2014

Publication date: March 23, 2014

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4359

ISBN: 978-1-61208-327-8

Location: Barcelona, Spain

Dates: from March 23, 2014 to March 27, 2014