CLASSIFICATION OF CYTOLOGICAL IMAGES OF WHITE BLOOD CELLS USING DEEP LEARNING

Abstract

Leukocytes, also known as white blood cells, are an important part of the immune system and represent a group of cells that protect the body from infections. The classification of leukocytes is widely used to diagnose various diseases, such as AIDS, leukemia, myeloma, anemia and others. However, traditional methods of classification of leukocytes require a lot of time, and their results are prone to errors. The article implements a computer approach to classification and detection of white blood cells on images of blood cells using deep learning methods based on the application of the method of transferring deep learning models and finetuning them. Deep learning has become one of the most popular areas of artificial intelligence. There are many neural network architectures used in deep learning in solving computer vision problems. The purpose of this study is to develop a computer system for efficient automatic detection and classification of leukocytes of four types of blood cells: eosinophils, lymphocytes, monocytes, neutrophils. This article used popular models of accurate neural networks VGG16, ResNet50, DensNet201, MobileNetV3, InceptionResnetV2, pretrained on ImageNet and finetuned on WBC images dataset.The paper also proposes a custom model of a deep neural network using separable convolutional blocks SeparableConv2D in its architecture. The model is optimized using methods of preprocessing normalization and data augmentation. The is model gave classification metrics of accuracy = 98.84 %, precision = 99.56 %, recall = 98.89 % and f1-score = 99.22 %. The developed model allows, in most cases, to determine with high speed whether a leukocyte belongs to one of the four classes in the image, which indicates the possibility of using the system as an auxiliary tool for hematological blood analysis.