The CELLSCAN system - T.M. a leucocyte pattern analyzer

Medical workers suspect that the incidence of the binucleate lymphocyte in the peripheral blood stream is an index of radiation damage. The fact that the incidence of this type of white cell is of the order of one per each million blood cells makes practical use of this index by the human observer essentially impossible. The Atomic Energy Commission has therefore arranged for the construction of a blood cell scanning system with which to determine the feasibility of the semi-automatic identification of the binucleate lymphobyte in glass-mounted smears of human blood. The CELLSCAN system consists of a closed circuit television microscope coupled to a special purpose digital computer. The system produces a quantized image of the leucocyte whose pattern is to be analyzed. The computer program causes the quantized image to be operated upon serially in such a way that groupings of contiguous binary "1's" are reduced to single 1's. Sampling the number of isolated 1's at various instants during the reduction process produces a histogram of the leucocyte's various constituent parts. The CELLSCAN system is intended to determine whether the resultant histogram of the binucleate lymphocyte is unique in the histogram population of all leucocytes.