"LeukNet" - A Model of Convolutional Neural Network for the Diagnosis of Leukemia

Abstract

Leukemia is a disorder that affects the bone marrow, causing uncontrolled production of leukocytes, impairing the transport of oxygen and causing blood coagulation problems. In this article, we propose a new computational tool, named LeukNet, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture based on the VGG-16 convolutional blocks, to facilitate the leukemia diagnosis from blood smear images. We evaluated different architectures and fine-tuning methods using 18 datasets containing 3536 images with distinct characteristics of color, texture, contrast, and resolution. Additionally, data augmentation operations were applied to increase the training set by up to 20 times. The k-fold cross-validation (k = 5) results achieved 98.28% of accuracy. A cross-dataset validation technique, named LeaveOne-Dataset-Out Cross-Validation (LODOCV), is also proposed to evaluate the developed model’s generalization capability. The accuracy of using LODOCV on the ALL-IDB 1, ALL-IDB 2, and UFG datasets was 97.04%, 82.46%, and 70.24%, respectively, overcoming the current state-of-the-art results and offering new guidelines for image-based computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems in this area.