Development of a system for the automatic analysis of chromosome aberrations

The frequency of structural chromosome abberation in peripheral human blood lymphocytes can be used for dose estimation in case of suspected radiation exposure. Especially dicentric chromosomes are a very specific indicator of ionizing radiation. The main disadvantage of this biological dosimetry is the great expenditure of human work, which prevents this method from becoming wide-spread for routine analyses. For this reason a system has been designed and built up which realizes all necessary hardware functions required for automation of most parts of this task. The required high processing speed for image analysis is made available by a real time video preprocessor and the multi-microprocessor-system 'POLYP'. The task of automated analyses is split in metaphase finding and scoring dicentric chromosomes. The metaphase finding program is already in routine use. The segmentation and classification was developed using a large learning set. A false-positive error rate of 0,74% was found. Finally the operator checks all objects classified as dicentrics. 1 fig. (Author)