Introduction:

Sickle-cell anemia is a genetic hereditary anomaly of hemoglobin characterized by red blood cells that lose their normal round morphology and acquire a sickle shape. Although no cure is so far available, several actions are in progress to improve the quality of life and medical care of patients.

Objective:

Become acquainted with aspects related to the automated morphological analysis of erythrocytes in recent years, particularly in the context of sickle-cell anemia, allowing to determine the current limitations, mainly in the use of automated tools for the clinical follow-up of sickle-cell anemia patients.

Methods:

A systematic review was conducted of the literature published in the years 2018, 2019, and two contributions from 2020, in three broad scope electronic databases: IEEEXplore, Google Scholar and SCOPUS. The documents were analyzed on the basis of specific questions to obtain general criteria about the situation of interest.

Conclusions:

The analysis conducted revealed a growing volume of research in this field, with results in several countries. Detailed examination of the studies led to identification of problems related to the evaluation metrics used, the algorithms for the analysis and processing of images, the use of medical criteria, the databases used and tools for the automated morphological analysis of erythrocytes.

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