The present invention relates to a blood cell identification and classification system, and more particularly to an improved system which has a photographing means for producing magnified images of cells in blood smears and generating video signals and an automatic analytical means for analyzing cells based on said video signals.
There are known several systems for the counting and analysis of blood cells. In such analytical systems, a magnified image of blood cells is photographed with a color television camera and a set of video signals corresponding to red, green and blue light wavelengths is obtained from the camera. The video signal set is processed in a central processing unit (hereinafter referred to briefly as CPU) to automatically perform a classification of white blood cells or a morphological analysis of red blood cells, or to count blood platelets. If there are blood cells which the CPU has failed to automatically identify and classify (such cells will be referred to as unknown cells), the unknown cells are played back on a monitor color picture tube after completion of analysis of the particular blood smear and the laboratory specialist in charge identifies these unknown cells and enters the results into the CPU. Since this identification of unknown cells by the hematologist or the like is conventionally performed for each blood specimen, the hematologist has to be available in front of the analytical system from the beginning to the end of analysis, thus imposing a serious restriction on the efficiency of hematological analysis.