Exploiting the Multiscale Information Fusion Capabilities for Aiding the Leukemia Diagnosis Through White Blood Cells Segmentation

Abstract

Leukemia is one of the most terminal types of blood cancer, and many people suffer from it every year. White blood cells (WBCs) have a significant association with leukemia diagnosis. Research studies reported that leukemia brings changes in WBC count and morphology. WBC accurate segmentation enables to detect morphology and WBC count which consequently helps in the diagnosis and prognosis of leukemia. Manual WBC assessment methods are tedious, subjective, and less accurate. To overcome these problems, we propose a multi-scale information fusion network (MIF-Net) for WBC segmentation. MIF-Net is a shallow architecture with internal and external spatial information fusion mechanisms. In WBC images, the cytoplasm is with low contrast compared to the background, whereas nuclei shape can be complex with an indistinctive boundary for some cases, therefore accurate segmentation becomes challenging. Spatial features in the initial layers of the network include fine boundary information and MIF-Net splits and propagates this boundary information on multi-scale for external information fusion. Multi-scale information fusion in our network helps in preserving boundary information and contributes to segmentation performance improvement. MIF-Net also uses internal information fusion after intervals for feature empowerment in different stages of the network. We evaluated our network for four publicly available datasets and achieved state-of-the-art segmentation performance. In addition, the proposed architecture exhibits superior computational efficiency by using only 2.67 million trainable parameters.