Refinement of ensemble strategy for acute lymphoblastic leukemia microscopic images using hybrid CNN-GRU-BiLSTM and MSVM classifier

Abstract

Acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL) is a common serious cancer in white blood cells (WBC) that advances quickly and produces abnormal cells in the bone marrow. Cancerous cells associated with ALL lead to impairment of body systems. Microscopic examination of ALL in a blood sample is applied manually by hematologists with many defects. Computer-aided leukemia image detection is used to avoid human visual recognition and to provide a more accurate diagnosis. This paper employs the ensemble strategy to detect ALL cells versus normal WBCs using three stages automatically. Firstly, image pre-processing is applied to handle the unbalanced database through the oversampling process. Secondly, deep spatial features are generated using a convolution neural network (CNN). At the same time, the gated recurrent unit (GRU)-bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) architecture is utilized to extract long-distance dependent information features or temporal features to obtain active feature learning. Thirdly, a softmax function and the multiclass support vector machine (MSVM) classifier are used for the classification mission. The proposed strategy has the resilience to classify the C-NMC 2019 database into two categories by using splitting the entire dataset into 90% as training and 10% as testing datasets. The main motivation of this paper is the novelty of the proposed framework for the purposeful and accurate diagnosis of ALL images. The proposed CNN-GRU-BiLSTM-MSVM is simply stacked by existing tools. However, the empirical results on C-NMC 2019 database show that the proposed framework is useful to the ALL image recognition problem compared to previous works. The DenseNet-201 model yielded an F1-score of 96.23% and an accuracy of 96.29% using the MSVM classifier in the test dataset. The findings exhibited that the proposed strategy can be employed as a complementary diagnostic tool for ALL cells. Further, this proposed strategy will encourage researchers to augment the rare database, such as blood microscopic images by creating powerful applications in terms of combining machine learning with deep learning algorithms.