Leukocyte classification using relative-relationship-guided contrastive learning

Abstract

Hematologic diseases and blood disorders can be studied through microscopic examination of blood smear images or chemical assays. Many researchers are focused on utilizing deep learning (DL) to identify, quantify, and classify various types of blood cells, which is crucial for addressing theoretical and practical challenges in disease diagnosis and treatment planning. However, there is a significant deficiency in annotations for leukocyte classification, limiting the effectiveness of current DL methods. Contrastive learning (CL) facilitates the extraction of prior knowledge from unlabeled data, reducing the dependency on manual annotations. While CL demonstrates remarkable achievements in classifying natural images, the direct application to leukocyte classification presents certain defects. We observe that standard data augmentation techniques in CL exhibit varying sensitivity to different categories of white blood cell images. Employing a uniform augmentation strategy may lead the network into an optimization trap, acquiring inadequate representations from erroneous sample relationships. To address this issue, we propose a Relative-Relationship-Guided Contrastive Learning Representation (ReCLR) framework for the leukocyte classification. ReCLR mines positive and negative samples based on relative distance knowledge. Specifically, we provide adversarial guidance for the positive sample, restricting the distance between the positive sample and the original sample less than but as close as possible to the distance between the original sample and the farthest negative sample. Then, we utilize the entropy constraint to regulate the relative distance relationship between the negative and original samples. Finally, the guided positive and negative samples are employed for contrastive learning in leukocyte classification. The extensive experiments, including linear evaluation, domain transfer, and fine-tuning, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Our ReCLR achieves accuracies of 92.07%, 65.36%, and 92.49% on three real-world leukocyte datasets, respectively, outperforming several state-of-the-art methods. The source code is released at https://github.com/AlchemyEmperor/ReCLR.