White blood cell segmentation based on dual path network and channel attention

Abstract

White blood cell (WBC, leukocyte) in blood smear image plays a crucial role in the diagnosis of many blood diseases. WBC segmentation is an important preprocessing step in blood disease diagnosis. However, due to some factors such as different dying technologies and different WBC appearances, WBC segmentation is still challenging. To improve accuracy of WBC segmentation, we propose an end-to-end WBC segmentation network. Specifically, we first introduce Dual Path Network (DPN) as a context-aware feature encoder to extract multi-scale image features. Then, we use a channel attention module to capture the interdependencies between channel maps, and further enhance feature representation capability of the proposed network. Finally, we reconstruct WBC feature maps by a feature decoder, and use skip connections to reduce image information loss. Experimental results on three datasets show that the proposed method obtains higher segmentation accuracy than the other methods.