A Review on White Blood Cell Classification for Leukemia Diagnosis Using Deep and Transfer Learning Techniques

White Blood Cell (WBC) classification plays a crucial role in diagnosing various hematological disorders and infections. Automated WBC classification using deep learning techniques has gained significant attention due to its efficiency and accuracy. This conference paper presents a study on the application of the VGG-19 deep learning model for WBC classification. The research highlights the methodology, experimental results, advantages, challenges, and future research directions in utilizing VGG-19 for medical image analysis, particularly in hematology. White Blood Cell (WBC) classification plays a crucial role in diagnosing various hematological disorders, including leukemia and infections. Traditional manual methods of WBC classification are time-consuming and prone to human error. Deep learning techniques, particularly Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), have demonstrated remarkable accuracy in medical image classification. This study explores the use of the VGG-19 architecture for automated WBC classification to enhance diagnostic efficiency and accuracy. The proposed model is trained on a labeled dataset of WBC images, leveraging the deep hierarchical features of VGG-19 to classify different WBC types, such as neutrophils, eosinophils, basophils, monocytes, and lymphocytes. Transfer learning is employed to fine-tune the pre-trained VGG-19 model, improving its performance on the specialized medical dataset. The model's performance is evaluated using accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score metrics. Experimental results indicate that the VGG-19-based approach achieves high classification accuracy, outperforming conventional machine learning methods.

Proper classification of white blood cells (WBCs) remains a critical task for medical diagnosis in leukemia, infections, and hematological disorders. WBC classification is based mainly on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) as the main methodology, despite the challenges in such methods in scanning microscopic images for distant dependencies. The current study adopts a hybrid model that combines Vision Transformers (ViTs) with CNNs for better WBC classification. The model has a ViT component that uses self-attention mechanisms to obtain whole-image features through global features extraction, while at the same time, neighborhood information is being extracted by the CNN module. The introduced model is evaluated using theBCCD Dataset (Blood Cell Count and Detection) for binary and multi-class separation of granulocytes/agranulocytes. Experimental tests indicate that the combined approach has robust classification accuracy with guaranteed reliable results in various evaluation metrics. The suggested method achieved 99.20% training accuracy, 87.90% test accuracy, a precision of 0.7083, a recall of 0.7000, and an F1-score of 0.6970, affirming its excellent classification precision. This hybrid deep learning model shows enhanced performance and interpretability, supporting its application in clinical diagnostic processes. These findings attest to excellent classification performance, positioning the model as an excellent choice for automated hematological diagnosis. The study opens up new horizons for combining CNNs and ViTs for improved medical image analysis while setting future development goals in WBC classification. Deep learning hybrid models have shown their significance for clinical diagnostics in the study through the development of enhanced detection systems against hematological diseases.

White blood cell (WBC) classification plays a crucial role in hematological diagnosis and is typically performed manually using microscopic images. However, manual analysis is limited by subjectivity and time inefficiency. With recent technological advances, artificial intelligence (AI) offers promising solutions for automated WBC classification that enhance accuracy and efficiency. This study presents a scoping review of 20 scientific publications discussing AI applications in microscopic image-based WBC classification. Literature searches were conducted in PubMed, ScienceDirect, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Enginers (IEEE) Xplore, and Google Scholar using relevant keywords such as “AI”, “white blood cell”, and “microscopic image”. Findings indicate that the most commonly used method is Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), either standalone or hybrid (e.g., YOLOv5, ResNet, Vision Transformer), achieving accuracies up to 99.7%. The datasets were mostly public Blood Cell Count and Detection (BCCD), Leucocyte Images for Segmentation and Classification (LISC), Raabin-WBC or local laboratory sources. The reviewed studies aimed at automatic WBC detection, classification, and morphological identification. Despite encouraging outcomes, challenges such as external validation and limited access to real clinical data remain. Overall, AI has proven effective in enhancing speed, accuracy, and objectivity in WBC classification. Further research is needed to support AI integration into real-world clinical laboratory practice. Keywords : Artificial intelligence, White blood cells, Classification, Microscopic image, CNN

White blood cell (WBC) classification plays a crucial role in hematopathology and clinical diagnostics. However, traditional methods are constrained by limited receptive fields and insufficient utilization of contextual information, which hinders classification performance. To address these limitations, this paper proposes an enhanced WBC classification algorithm, CCE-YOLOv7, which is built upon the YOLOv7 framework. The proposed method introduces four key innovations to enhance detection accuracy and model efficiency: (1) A novel Conv2Former (Convolutional Transformer) backbone was designed to combine the local pattern extraction capability of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with the global contextual reasoning of transformers, thereby improving the expressiveness of feature representation. (2) The CARAFE (Content-Aware ReAssembly of Features) upsampling operator was adopted to replace conventional interpolation methods, thereby enhancing the spatial resolution and semantic richness of feature maps. (3) An Efficient Multi-scale Attention (EMA) module was introduced to refine multi-scale feature fusion, enabling the model to better focus on spatially relevant features critical for WBC classification. (4) Soft-NMS (Soft Non-Maximum Suppression) was used instead of traditional NMS to better preserve true positives in densely packed or overlapping cell scenarios, thereby reducing false positives and false negatives. Experimental validation was conducted on a WBC image dataset acquired using the Fourier ptychographic microscopy (FPM) system. The proposed CCE-YOLOv7 achieved a detection accuracy of 89.3%, showing a 7.8% improvement over the baseline YOLOv7. Furthermore, CCE-YOLOv7 reduced the number of parameters by 2 million and lowered computational complexity by 5.7 GFLOPs, offering an efficient and lightweight model suitable for real-time clinical applications. To further evaluate model effectiveness, comparative experiments were conducted with YOLOv8 and YOLOv11. CCE-YOLOv7 achieved a 4.1% higher detection accuracy than YOLOv8 while reducing computational cost by 2.4 GFLOPs. Compared with the more advanced YOLOv11, CCE-YOLOv7 maintained competitive accuracy (only 0.6% lower) while using significantly fewer parameters and 4.3 GFLOPs less in computation, highlighting its superior trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. These results demonstrate that CCE-YOLOv7 provides a robust, accurate, and computationally efficient solution for automated WBC classification, with significant clinical applicability.

Comparison of traditional image processing and deep learning approaches for classification of white blood cells in peripheral blood smear images

BackgroundBlood smear microscopic images are routinely investigated by haematologists to diagnose most blood diseases. However, the task is quite tedious and time consuming. An automatic detection and classification of white blood cells within such images can accelerate the process tremendously. In this paper we propose a system to locate white blood cells within microscopic blood smear images, segment them into nucleus and cytoplasm regions, extract suitable features and finally, classify them into five types: basophil, eosinophil, neutrophil, lymphocyte and monocyte.DatasetTwo sets of blood smear images were used in this study’s experiments. Dataset 1, collected from Rangsit University, were normal peripheral blood slides under light microscope with 100× magnification; 555 images with 601 white blood cells were captured by a Nikon DS-Fi2 high-definition color camera and saved in JPG format of size 960 × 1,280 pixels at 15 pixels per 1 μm resolution. In dataset 2, 477 cropped white blood cell images were downloaded from CellaVision.com. They are in JPG format of size 360 × 363 pixels. The resolution is estimated to be 10 pixels per 1 μm.MethodsThe proposed system comprises a pre-processing step, nucleus segmentation, cell segmentation, feature extraction, feature selection and classification. The main concept of the segmentation algorithm employed uses white blood cell’s morphological properties and the calibrated size of a real cell relative to image resolution. The segmentation process combined thresholding, morphological operation and ellipse curve fitting. Consequently, several features were extracted from the segmented nucleus and cytoplasm regions. Prominent features were then chosen by a greedy search algorithm called sequential forward selection. Finally, with a set of selected prominent features, both linear and naïve Bayes classifiers were applied for performance comparison. This system was tested on normal peripheral blood smear slide images from two datasets.ResultsTwo sets of comparison were performed: segmentation and classification. The automatically segmented results were compared to the ones obtained manually by a haematologist. It was found that the proposed method is consistent and coherent in both datasets, with dice similarity of 98.9 and 91.6% for average segmented nucleus and cell regions, respectively. Furthermore, the overall correction rate in the classification phase is about 98 and 94% for linear and naïve Bayes models, respectively.ConclusionsThe proposed system, based on normal white blood cell morphology and its characteristics, was applied to two different datasets. The results of the calibrated segmentation process on both datasets are fast, robust, efficient and coherent. Meanwhile, the classification of normal white blood cells into five types shows high sensitivity in both linear and naïve Bayes models, with slightly better results in the linear classifier.

White blood cells play a vital role in monitoring health condition of a person. Change in count and/or appearance of these cells indicate hematological disorders. Manual microscopic evaluation of white blood cells is the gold standard method, but the result depends on skill and experience of the hematologist. In this paper we present a comparative study of feature extraction using two approaches for classification of white blood cells. In the first approach, features were extracted using traditional image processing method and in the second approach we employed AlexNet which is a pre-trained convolutional neural network as feature generator. We used neural network for classification of WBCs. The results demonstrate that, classification result is slightly better for the features extracted using the convolutional neural network approach compared to traditional image processing approach. The average accuracy and sensitivity of 99% was obtained for classification of white blood cells. Hence, any one of these methods can be used for classification of WBCs depending availability of data and required resources.

Machine learning has endless applications in the health care industry. White blood cell classification is one of the interesting and promising area of research. The classification of the white blood cells plays an important part in the medical diagnosis. In practise white blood cell classification is performed by the haematologist by taking a small smear of blood and careful examination under the microscope. The current procedures to identify the white blood cell subtype is more time taking and error-prone. The computer aided detection and diagnosis of the white blood cells tend to avoid the human error and reduce the time taken to classify the white blood cells. In the recent years several deep learning approaches have been developed in the context of classification of the white blood cells that are able to identify but are unable to localize the positions of white blood cells in the blood cell image. Following this, the present research proposes to utilize YOLOv3 object detection technique to localize and classify the white blood cells with bounding boxes. With exhaustive experimental analysis, the proposed work is found to detect the white blood cell with 99.2% accuracy and classify with 90% accuracy.

BackgroundComputer-aided methods for analyzing white blood cells (WBC) are popular due to the complexity of the manual alternatives. Recent works have shown highly accurate segmentation and detection of white blood cells from microscopic blood images. However, the classification of the observed cells is still a challenge, in part due to the distribution of the five types that affect the condition of the immune system.Methods(i) This work proposes W-Net, a CNN-based method for WBC classification. We evaluate W-Net on a real-world large-scale dataset that includes 6562 real images of the five WBC types. (ii) For further benefits, we generate synthetic WBC images using Generative Adversarial Network to be used for education and research purposes through sharing.Results(i) W-Net achieves an average accuracy of 97%. In comparison to state-of-the-art methods in the field of WBC classification, we show that W-Net outperforms other CNN- and RNN-based model architectures. Moreover, we show the benefits of using pre-trained W-Net in a transfer learning context when fine-tuned to specific task or accommodating another dataset. (ii) The synthetic WBC images are confirmed by experiments and a domain expert to have a high degree of similarity to the original images. The pre-trained W-Net and the generated WBC dataset are available for the community to facilitate reproducibility and follow up research work.ConclusionThis work proposed W-Net, a CNN-based architecture with a small number of layers, to accurately classify the five WBC types. We evaluated W-Net on a real-world large-scale dataset and addressed several challenges such as the transfer learning property and the class imbalance. W-Net achieved an average classification accuracy of 97%. We synthesized a dataset of new WBC image samples using DCGAN, which we released to the public for education and research purposes.

Machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models are being increasingly employed for medical imagery analyses, with both approaches used to enhance the accuracy of classification/prediction in the diagnoses of various cancers, tumors and bloodborne diseases. To date however, no review of these techniques and their application(s) within the domain of white blood cell (WBC) classification in blood smear images has been undertaken, representing a notable knowledge gap with respect to model selection and comparison. Accordingly, the current study sought to comprehensively identify, explore and contrast ML and DL methods for classifying WBCs. Following development and implementation of a formalized review protocol, a cohort of 136 primary studies published between January 2006 and May 2023 were identified from the global literature, with the most widely used techniques and best-performing WBC classification methods subsequently ascertained. Studies derived from 26 countries, with highest numbers from high-income countries including the United States (n = 32) and The Netherlands (n = 26). While WBC classification was originally rooted in conventional ML, there has been a notable shift toward the use of DL, and particularly convolutional neural networks (CNN), with 54.4% of identified studies (n = 74) including the use of CNNs, and particularly in concurrence with larger datasets and bespoke features e.g., parallel data pre-processing, feature selection, and extraction. While some conventional ML models achieved up to 99% accuracy, accuracy was shown to decrease in concurrence with decreasing dataset size. Deep learning models exhibited improved performance for more extensive datasets and exhibited higher levels of accuracy in concurrence with increasingly large datasets. Availability of appropriate datasets remains a primary challenge, potentially resolvable using data augmentation techniques. Moreover, medical training of computer science researchers is recommended to improve current understanding of leucocyte structure and subsequent selection of appropriate classification models. Likewise, it is critical that future health professionals be made aware of the power, efficacy, precision and applicability of computer science, soft computing and artificial intelligence contributions to medicine, and particularly in areas like medical imaging.

Artificial intelligence (AI), particularly deep learning (DL), has significantly advanced medical image analysis, including the detection and classification of blood cancer through blood smear images. This review explores the state-of-the-art data mining (DM) and DL techniques applied in the identification and classification of white blood cells (WBCs), with a focus on leukemia diagnosis. By systematically analyzing relevant literature from 2014 to 2024, the study highlights key AI algorithms, including traditional machine learning models such as SVM, KNN, and ANN, as well as modern DL architectures like CNN, RCNN, ResNet, and hybrid models. The review evaluates their performance, clinical applicability, and implementation challenges. Particular attention is given to the strengths of DL in feature extraction and classification accuracy, which often surpass traditional DM approaches. Despite these advances, issues such as data scarcity, computational cost, and the need for medical expertise remain major challenges. The study also outlines future directions involving lightweight DL models, transfer learning, and open-access datasets to enhance clinical deployment. Ultimately, this work provides a comprehensive foundation for researchers and developers aiming to improve blood cancer diagnosis through automated medical imaging systems powered by AI.

Isolation and two-step classification of normal white blood cells in peripheral blood smears

White blood cells (leukocytes) are a very important component of the blood that forms the immune system, which is responsible for fighting foreign elements. The five types of white blood cells include neutrophils, eosinophils, lymphocytes, monocytes, and basophils, where each type constitutes a different proportion and performs specific functions. Being able to classify and, therefore, count these different constituents is critical for assessing the health of patients and infection risks. Generally, laboratory experiments are used for determining the type of a white blood cell. The staining process and manual evaluation of acquired images under the microscope are tedious and subject to human errors. Moreover, a major challenge is the unavailability of training data that cover the morphological variations of white blood cells so that trained classifiers can generalize well. As such, this paper investigates image transformation operations and generative adversarial networks (GAN) for data augmentation and state-of-the-art deep neural networks (i.e., VGG-16, ResNet, and DenseNet) for the classification of white blood cells into the five types. Furthermore, we explore initializing the DNNs' weights randomly or using weights pretrained on the CIFAR-100 dataset. In contrast to other works that require advanced image preprocessing and manual feature extraction before classification, our method works directly with the acquired images. The results of extensive experiments show that the proposed method can successfully classify white blood cells. The best DNN model, DenseNet-169, yields a validation accuracy of 98.8%. Particularly, we find that the proposed approach outperforms other methods that rely on sophisticated image processing and manual feature engineering.

Leukemia is one of the deadliest diseases in human life, it is a type of cancer that hits blood cells. The task of diagnosing Leukemia is time consuming and tedious for doctors; it is also challenging to determine the level and type of Leukemia. The diagnoses of Leukemia are achieved through identifying the changes on the White blood Cells (WBC). WBCs are divided into five types: Neutrophils, Eosinophils, Basophils, Monocytes, and Lymphocytes. In this paper, the authors propose a Convolutional Neural Network to detect and classify normal white blood cells. The program will learn about the shape and type of normal WBC by performing the following two tasks. The first task is identifying high level features of a normal white blood cell. The second task is classifying the normal white blood cell according to its type. Using a Convolutional Neural Network CNN, the system will be able to detect normal WBCs by comparing them with the high-level features of normal WBC. This process of identifying and classifying WBC can be vital for doctors and medical staff to make a decision. The proposed network achieves an accuracy up to 96.78% with a dataset including 10,000 blood cell images.

White blood cells detection and classification based on regional convolutional neural networks