Classification of Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia through the Fusion of Local Descriptors

Abstract

Leukemia is characterized by an abnormal proliferation of leukocytes in the bone marrow and blood, which is usually detected by pathologists using a microscope to examine a blood smear. Leukemia identification and diagnosis in advance are a trending topic in medical applications for decreasing the death toll of individuals with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL). It is critical to analyze the white blood cells for the identification of ALL for which the blood smear images are utilized. This paper discusses and presents a micro-pattern descriptor, called Local Directional Number Pattern along with Multi-scale Weber Local Descriptor for feature extraction task to determine cancerous and noncancerous blood cells. A balanced dataset with 260 blood smear images from the ALL-IDB2 dataset was used as training data. Consequently, a proposed model was constructed by applying different individual and combined feature extraction methods, and fed into the machine learning classifiers (Decision Tree, Ensemble, K-Nearest Neighbors, Naïve Bayes, and Random Forest) to determine cancerous and noncancerous blood cells. Experimental results indicate that the developed feature fusion technique assured a reasonable performance compared to other existing works with a testing average accuracy of 97.69 ± 1.83% using Ensemble classifier.