Identification of Sickle Cells from Microscopic Blood Smear Image Using Image Processing

Blood is a connective tissue in fluid form. Blood cell counting gives vital information about a patient’s health. It is used to evaluate and diagnose diseases such as anaemia, polycythemia, leukemia, thrombocytosis thrombocytopenia, identification of sickle cells etc. It indirectly measures the oxygen carrying capacity of blood.  There are many blood cell counting methods. The oldest is the manual counting which is still considered as the “gold standard†method for counting blood cells. But this method is subjective and the result depends on the technician.  Other method for blood cell counting is by using an automatic hematology analyser. This method gives an accurate blood cell count but the cost of the machine is very high also it cannot identify sickle cells. This paper presents a simple method to count the red blood cells and identify sickle cells using Circular Hough Transform an Image processing technique