A thresholding method for blood-aggregate images

Among the wide ranging forms of medical diagnostic modalities, blood analysis is one of the most common, and is likely to become more important as various blood related diseases become more pervasive. Histogram-based methods are among the most popular for thresholding a biomedical image of blood aggregates in a plastic tube. However, these methods often do not provide good results over the entire area of interest, because the statistical assumptions of the methods are violated: i.e., the results are not independent of the blood aggregate location in the tube. Here, the authors apply some useful modifications to three popular histogram methods in order to meet the statistical criteria for independent samples, and thus improve the methods' accuracy. These modifications include a top-hat (mathematical) transformation to compensate for background variations.