Easy-GT: Open-Source Software to Facilitate Making the Ground Truth for White Blood Cells Nucleus

Abstract

The nucleus of white blood cells (WBCs) plays a significant role in their detection and classification. Appropriate feature extraction of the nucleus is necessary to fit a suitable artificial intelligence model to classify WBCs. Therefore, designing a method is needed to segment the nucleus accurately. There should be a comparison between the ground truths distinguished by a hematologist and the detected nuclei to evaluate the performance of the nucleus segmentation method accurately. It is a time-consuming and tedious task for experts to establish the ground truth manually. This paper presents an intelligent open-source software called Easy-GT to create the ground truth of WBCs' nucleus faster and easier. This software first detects the nucleus by employing a new Otsu's thresholding-based method with a dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of 95.42 %; the hematologist can then create a more accurate ground truth, using the designed buttons to modify the threshold value. This software can speed up ground truth's forming process more than six times.