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Traditional clinical diagnostic aid systems for medical images are facing challenges of reliability and interpretability. Artificial intelligence has the potential to bring driving changes to disease diagnosis methods through rapid traversal of medical images and efficient classification. However, the application of artificial intelligence in the field of medical image still faces challenges. Our method combines the multiple modalities of attention which consider the most discriminative part in the images. The proposed classification method is tested on the microscopic image dataset with 40 leukocyte categories, which achieves top-1 accuracy of 84.21% and top-5 accuracy of 99.44% during the testing procedure. And experiments on the dermoscopic image dataset show that our method has good generalization ability across multiple imaging modalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leukemia is a fatal disease that requires the counting of White Blood Cells (WBCs) in bone marrow for diagnosis. However, bone marrow blood contains many types of leukocytes, some of which have subtle differences. To address this issue, we propose the WBC-GLAformer model, which comprises three parts: Low-level Feature Extractor (LFE) , Global–Local Attention based Encoder (GLAE) , and Discrimination Part Select (DPS). The LFE uses a convolutional neural network (CNN) to tokenize patches from the extracted low-level features. The GLAE combines the ability of the CNN to extract local features with the ability of the transformer to extract global features, thereby enriching the features of leukocyte images. The DPS improves the accuracy of leukocyte classification by selecting the discriminative regions. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results in the bone marrow leukocyte fine-grained classification dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that the model has good generalization on different datasets and is more robust to the optimizer. And visualization results show that the model can effectively focus on the discriminative parts of different cells. Code is available at https://github.com/ywj1/WBC-GLAformer [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The necessary step in the diagnosis of leukemia by the attending physician is to classify the white blood cells in the bone marrow, which requires the attending physician to have a wealth of clinical experience. Now the deep learning is very suitable for the study of image recognition classification, and the effect is not good enough to directly use some famous convolution neural network (CNN) models, such as AlexNet model, GoogleNet model, and VGGFace model. In this paper, we construct a new CNN model called WBCNet model that can fully extract features of the microscopic white blood cell image by combining batch normalization algorithm, residual convolution architecture, and improved activation function. WBCNet model has 33 layers of network architecture, whose speed has greatly been improved compared with the traditional CNN model in training period, and it can quickly identify the category of white blood cell images. The accuracy rate is 77.65% for Top-1 and 98.65% for Top-5 on the training set, while 83% for Top-1 on the test set. This study can help doctors diagnose leukemia, and reduce misdiagnosis rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and objective: Leukocyte classification and cytometry have wide applications in medical domain, previous researches usually exploit machine learning techniques to classify leukocytes automatically. However, constrained by the past development of machine learning techniques, for example, extracting distinctive features from raw microscopic images are difficult, the widely used SVM classifier only has relative few parameters to tune, these methods cannot efficiently handle fine-grained classification cases when the white blood cells have up to 40 categories. Methods: Based on deep learning theory, a systematic study is conducted on finer leukocyte classification in this paper. A deep residual neural network based leukocyte classifier is constructed at first, which can imitate the domain expert’s cell recognition process, and extract salient features robustly and automatically. Then the deep neural network classifier’s topology is adjusted according to the prior knowledge of white blood cell test. After that the microscopic image dataset with almost one hundred thousand labeled leukocytes belonging to 40 categories is built, and combined training strategies are adopted to make the designed classifier has good generalization ability. Results: The proposed deep residual neural network based classifier was tested on microscopic image dataset with 40 leukocyte categories. It achieves top-1 accuracy of 77.80%, top-5 accuracy of 98.75% during the training procedure. The average accuracy on the test set is nearly 76.84%. Conclusions: This paper presents a fine-grained leukocyte classification method for microscopic images, based on deep residual learning theory and medical domain knowledge. Experimental results validate the feasibility and effectiveness of our approach. Extended experiments support that the fine-grained leukocyte classifier could be used in real medical applications, assist doctors in diagnosing diseases, reduce human power significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]