Utilization of depth-wise and spatially separable convolutional network fusion for classification of white blood cells

Abstract

White blood cells (WBCs) are an essential part of the human immune system, playing a significant role in fighting diseases and infections. Their detection and classification from microscopic blood images is a crucial step in diagnosing various diseases. Looking at cells by hand is still key, but it takes a lot of work and mistakes can happen. So, this study tries to improve how to find and sort WBCs using some cool computer tricks. The study tackling issues like cells being on top of each other, looking different, and not having a ton of data. To achieve this, image enhancement techniques were applied using contrast enhancement algorithm, contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE), and image segmentation techniques using color isolation are employed, which contributes to more accurate separation of overlapping cells, and enables faster and more efficient diagnosis. To efficiently complete the classification process after the segmentation process, a neural network structure consisting of combining three types of convolutional layers (depthwise, spatially, and convolution) was used. To evaluate the proposed technique, experiments were conducted using an open-source blood cell count and detection (BCCD) dataset from the Kaggle platform, and resulted in achieving a classification accuracy of 99.06% and an F1-score of 99.05%. This highlight of the model’s ability to efficiently deal with the challenges associated with WBC classification.