Cell Image Classification Research Articles

A fine-grained image classification algorithm based on self-supervised learning and multi-feature fusion of blood cells

Leukemia is a prevalent and widespread blood disease, and its early diagnosis is crucial for effective patient treatment. Diagnosing leukemia types heavily relies on pathologists’ morphological examination of blood cell images. However, this process is tedious and time-consuming, and the diagnostic results are subjective, leading to potential misdiagnosis and underdiagnosis. This paper proposes a blood cell image classification method that combines MAE with an enhanced Vision Transformer to tackle these challenges. Initially, pre-training occurs on two datasets, TMAMD and Red4, using the MAE self-supervised learning algorithm. Subsequently, the pre-training weights are transferred to our improved model.This paper introduces feature fusion of the outputs from each layer of the Transformer encoder to maximize the utilization of features extracted from lower layers, such as color, contour, and texture of blood cells, along with deeper semantic features. Furthermore, the dynamic margins for the subcenter Arcface Loss function are employed to enhance the model’s fine-grained feature representation by achieving inter-class dispersion and intra-class aggregation. Models trained using our method achieved state-of-the-art results on both the TMAMD dataset and Red4 dataset, with classification accuracies of 93.51% and 81.41%, respectively. This achievement is expected to be a valuable reference for physicians in their clinical diagnoses.

A systematic review on deep learning based methods for cervical cell image analysis

Cervical cytology image analysis is indispensable for the detection of abnormal cervical cells. Traditionally, manual screening is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Therefore, a lot of deep learning (DL)-based automatic detection methods have been employed in this field to provide timely, accurate and objective results. In this study, we systematically review the current developments in cervical cell image analysis with DL methods. Specifically, we first present the most popular DL models that are widely applied in cervical cell analysis. Second, we describe the methodology for conducting this review. Third, we provide all publicly available datasets related to cervical cell images to the best of our knowledge. Then, we introduce relevant evaluation metrics and loss functions. Next, we summarize and assort the applications for cervical cell classification and segmentation. Afterwards, we discuss about current challenges and future research directions in this field. Finally, we draw the conclusion of this review.According to the analysis, we conclude that the studies based on DL models have maintained an increasing trend in recent years, which indicates the potential of DL in cervical cell image analysis. In cervical cell image classification, CNN is the most commonly used DL model. Among CNN models, we can find that VGGNet and ResNet are the most popular network architectures for the classification of cervical cells. Transformer is the second commonly used DL model. Moreover, Herlev and SIPaKMeD are the most popular public datasets used for cervical cell classification. In cervical cell segmentation, U-Net and FCN are the two most popular DL architectures. In addition, ISBI2014 and Herlev datasets are the most frequently used among the existing publicly available segmentation datasets. However, there are some issues in this field, such as poor cervical cell classification performance as a result of similar pathological properties between different cell categories. Therefore, it is necessary to develop more effective methods with DL models to improve these issues in the future research.

Generation of Rule-Based Explanations of CNN Classifiers Using Regional Features

Although Deep Learning networks generally outperform traditional machine learning approaches based on tailored features, they often lack explainability. To address this issue, numerous methods have been proposed, particularly for image-related tasks such as image classification or object segmentation. These methods generate a heatmap that visually explains the classification problem by identifying the most important regions for the classifier. However, these explanations remain purely visual. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a novel CNN explainability method that identifies the most relevant regions in an image and generates a decision tree based on meaningful regional features, providing a rule-based explanation of the classification model. We evaluated the proposed method on a synthetic blob’s dataset and subsequently applied it to two cell image classification datasets with healthy and pathological patterns.

An attention-based deep learning for acute lymphoblastic leukemia classification

The bone marrow overproduces immature cells in the malignancy known as Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL). In the United States, about 6500 occurrences of ALL are diagnosed each year in both children and adults, comprising nearly 25% of pediatric cancer cases. Recently, many computer-assisted diagnosis (CAD) systems have been proposed to aid hematologists in reducing workload, providing correct results, and managing enormous volumes of data. Traditional CAD systems rely on hematologists’ expertise, specialized features, and subject knowledge. Utilizing early detection of ALL can aid radiologists and doctors in making medical decisions. In this study, Deep Dilated Residual Convolutional Neural Network (DDRNet) is presented for the classification of blood cell images, focusing on eosinophils, lymphocytes, monocytes, and neutrophils. To tackle challenges like vanishing gradients and enhance feature extraction, the model incorporates Deep Residual Dilated Blocks (DRDB) for faster convergence. Conventional residual blocks are strategically placed between layers to preserve original information and extract general feature maps. Global and Local Feature Enhancement Blocks (GLFEB) balance weak contributions from shallow layers for improved feature normalization. The global feature from the initial convolution layer, when combined with GLFEB-processed features, reinforces classification representations. The Tanh function introduces non-linearity. A Channel and Spatial Attention Block (CSAB) is integrated into the neural network to emphasize or minimize specific feature channels, while fully connected layers transform the data. The use of a sigmoid activation function concentrates on relevant features for multiclass lymphoblastic leukemia classification The model was analyzed with Kaggle dataset (16,249 images) categorized into four classes, with a training and testing ratio of 80:20. Experimental results showed that DRDB, GLFEB and CSAB blocks’ feature discrimination ability boosted the DDRNet model F1 score to 0.96 with minimal computational complexity and optimum classification accuracy of 99.86% and 91.98% for training and testing data. The DDRNet model stands out from existing methods due to its high testing accuracy of 91.98%, F1 score of 0.96, minimal computational complexity, and enhanced feature discrimination ability. The strategic combination of these blocks (DRDB, GLFEB, and CSAB) are designed to address specific challenges in the classification process, leading to improved discrimination of features crucial for accurate multi-class blood cell image identification. Their effective integration within the model contributes to the superior performance of DDRNet.

The detection and classification of acute myeloid leukaemia blood cell images based on different YOLO approaches

Medical image examination with a deep learning approach is greatly beneficial in the healthcare industry for faster diagnosis and disease monitoring. One of the popular deep learning algorithms such as you only look once (YOLO) developed for object detection is a successful state-ofthe-art algorithm in real-time object detection systems. Although YOLO is continuously improving in the object detection area, there are still questions about how different YOLO versions compare in terms of performance. We utilize eight YOLO versions to classify acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) blood cells in image examinations. We also acquired the publicly available AML dataset from the cancer imaging archive (TCIA) which consists of expert-labeled single cell images. Data augmentation techniques are additionally applied to enhance and balance the training images in the dataset. The overall results indicated that eight types of YOLO approaches have outstanding performances of more than 90% in precision and sensitivity. In comparison, YOLOv4-tiny has a more reliable performance than the other seven approaches. Consistently, the YOLOv4-tiny also achieved the highest AUC score. Therefore, this work can potentially provide a beneficial digital rapid tool in the screening and evaluation of numerous haematological disorders.

Convolutional Neural Networks in Malaria Diagnosis: A Study on Cell Image Classification

INTRODUCTION: Malaria, a persistent global health threat caused by Plasmodium parasites, necessitates rapid and accurate identification for effective treatment and containment. This study investigates the utilization of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to enhance the precision and speed of malaria detection through the classification of cell images infected with malaria.
 OBJECTIVES: The primary objective of this research is to explore the effectiveness of CNNs in accurately classifying malaria-infected cell images. By employing various deep learning models, including ResNet50, AlexNet, Inception V3, VGG19, VGG16, and MobileNetV2, the study aims to assess the performance of each model and identify their strengths and weaknesses in malaria diagnosis.
 METHODS: A balanced dataset comprising approximately 8,000 enhanced images of blood cells, evenly distributed between infected and uninfected classes, was utilized for model training and evaluation. Performance evaluation metrics such as precision, recall, F1-score, and accuracy were employed to assess the efficacy of each CNN model in malaria classification.
 RESULTS: The results demonstrate high accuracy across all models, with AlexNet and VGG19 exhibiting the highest levels of accuracy. However, the selection of a model should consider specific application requirements and constraints, as each model presents unique trade-offs between computational efficiency and performance.
 CONCLUSION: This study contributes to the burgeoning field of deep learning in healthcare, particularly in utilizing medical imaging for disease diagnosis. The findings underscore the considerable potential of CNNs in enhancing malaria diagnosis. Future research directions may involve further model optimization, exploration of larger and more diverse datasets, and the integration of CNNs into practical diagnostic tools for real-world deployment.

AnoMalNet: outlier detection based malaria cell image classification method leveraging deep autoencoder

<p>Class imbalance is a pervasive issue in the field of disease classification from medical images. It is necessary to balance out the class distribution while training a model. However, in the case of rare medical diseases, images from affected patients are much harder to come by compared to images from non-affected patients, resulting in unwanted class imbalance. Various processes of tackling class imbalance issues have been explored so far, each having its fair share of drawbacks. In this research, we propose an outlier detection based image classification technique which can handle even the most extreme case of class imbalance. We have utilized a dataset of malaria parasitized and uninfected cells. An autoencoder model titled AnoMalNet is trained with only the uninfected cell images at the beginning and then used to classify both the affected and non-affected cell images by thresholding a loss value. We have achieved an accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score of 98.49%, 97.07%, 100%, and 98.52% respectively, performing better than large deep learning models and other published works. As our proposed approach can provide competitive results without needing the disease-positive samples during training, it should prove to be useful in binary disease classification on imbalanced datasets.</p>

Classification of human protein cell images using deep neural networks

Previously, single classification models were mainly studied to classify human protein cell images, i.e., to identify a certain protein based on a set of different cells. However, a classifier can identify only one protein, in fact, a single cell usually consists of multiple proteins, and the proteins are not completely independent of each other. In this paper, we build a human protein cell classification model by multi-label learning. The logical relationship and distribution characteristics among the labels are analyzed to determine the different proteins contained in a set of different cells (i.e., containing multiple elements in the output space). In this paper, using human protein image data, we conducted comparison experiments on pre-trained Xception and InceptionResnet V2 to optimize the two models in terms of data augmentation, channel settings, and model structure. The results show that the Optimized InceptionResnet V2 model achieves high performance in the classification task. The final accuracy of the Optimized InceptionResnet V2 model we obtained reached 96.1%, which is a 2.82% improvement relative to that before the optimized model.

Blood cell image segmentation and classification: a systematic review.

Blood diseases such as leukemia, anemia, lymphoma, and thalassemia are hematological disorders that relate to abnormalities in the morphology and concentration of blood elements, specifically white blood cells (WBC) and red blood cells (RBC). Accurate and efficient diagnosis of these conditions significantly depends on the expertise of hematologists and pathologists. To assist the pathologist in the diagnostic process, there has been growing interest in utilizing computer-aided diagnostic (CAD) techniques, particularly those using medical image processing and machine learning algorithms. Previous surveys in this domain have been narrowly focused, often only addressing specific areas like segmentation or classification but lacking a holistic view like segmentation, classification, feature extraction, dataset utilization, evaluation matrices, etc. This survey aims to provide a comprehensive and systematic review of existing literature and research work in the field of blood image analysis using deep learning techniques. It particularly focuses on medical image processing techniques and deep learning algorithms that excel in the morphological characterization of WBCs and RBCs. The review is structured to cover four main areas: segmentation techniques, classification methodologies, descriptive feature selection, evaluation parameters, and dataset selection for the analysis of WBCs and RBCs. Our analysis reveals several interesting trends and preferences among researchers. Regarding dataset selection, approximately 50% of research related to WBC segmentation and 60% for RBC segmentation opted for manually obtaining images rather than using a predefined dataset. When it comes to classification, 45% of the previous work on WBCs chose the ALL-IDB dataset, while a significant 73% of researchers focused on RBC classification decided to manually obtain images from medical institutions instead of utilizing predefined datasets. In terms of feature selection for classification, morphological features were the most popular, being chosen in 55% and 80% of studies related to WBC and RBC classification, respectively. The diagnostic accuracy for blood-related diseases like leukemia, anemia, lymphoma, and thalassemia can be significantly enhanced through the effective use of CAD techniques, which have evolved considerably in recent years. This survey provides a broad and in-depth review of the techniques being employed, from image segmentation to classification, feature selection, utilization of evaluation matrices, and dataset selection. The inconsistency in dataset selection suggests a need for standardized, high-quality datasets to strengthen the diagnostic capabilities of these techniques further. Additionally, the popularity of morphological features indicates that future research could further explore and innovate in this direction.

A federated learning aided system for classifying cervical cancer using PAP-SMEAR images

Cervical cancer is a significant contributor to female mortality on a global scale, especially in low-income countries where effective screening programs for the detection and treatment of precancerous conditions are lacking. Classification of pap-smear test cervical cell images is crucial as it gives essential information for the diagnosis of malignant or precancerous lesions and thus helps in providing a proper diagnosis. Most of the existing methods require accumulating pap-smear test images of all patients in a centralized location for classification purposes. However, this procedure may hamper the privacy of patient data and create data ownership issues. In this study, different convolutional neural network-based federated learning architectures are introduced to achieve both the objectives of accurate image classification and data privacy in three different experimental settings. In the proposed system, the updates of the locally trained models get aggregated with an initially untrained global model in order to increase its performance. In traditional ML-based systems, the more the train data, the more efficiently the model performs, but in the proposed system, clients can participate remotely to train a robust model even with the disadvantage of possessing a small dataset. The proposed CNN-based FL architecture showed test accuracy of 94.36% and 78.4% in an IID (Independent and Identically Distributed) and a non-IID setting respectively. Thus multiple hospitals across different countries can use the proposed system to train their local models with their private dataset without sharing it centrally, which eventually will help to build the central model of federated learning architecture with diverse datasets.

An improved ensemble deep belief model (EDBM) for pap-smear cell image classification

An improved ensemble deep belief model (EDBM) for pap-smear cell image classification

Evaluation of deep learning training strategies for the classification of bone marrow cell images

Background and Objective: The classification of bone marrow (BM) cells by light microscopy is an important cornerstone of hematological diagnosis, performed thousands of times a day by highly trained specialists in laboratories worldwide. As the manual evaluation of blood or BM smears is very time-consuming and prone to inter-observer variation, new reliable automated systems are needed.Methods: We aim to improve the automatic classification performance of hematological cell types. Therefore, we evaluate four state-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures on a dataset of 171,374 microscopic cytological single-cell images obtained from BM smears from 945 patients diagnosed with a variety of hematological diseases. We further evaluate the effect of an in-domain vs. out-of-domain pre-training, and assess whether class activation maps provide human-interpretable explanations for the models' predictions.Results: The best performing pre-trained model (Regnet_y_32gf) yields a mean precision, recall, and F1 scores of 0.787±0.060, 0.755±0.061, and 0.762±0.050, respectively. This is a 53.5% improvement in precision and 7.3% improvement in recall over previous results with CNNs (ResNeXt-50) that were trained from scratch. The out-of-domain pre-training apparently yields general feature extractors/filters that apply very well to the BM cell classification use case. The class activation maps on cell types with characteristic morphological features were found to be consistent with the explanations of a human domain expert. For example, the Auer rods in the cytoplasm were the predictive cellular feature for correctly classified images of faggot cells.Conclusions: Our study provides data that can help hematology laboratories to choose the optimal training strategy for blood cell classification deep learning models to improve computer-assisted blood and bone marrow cell identification. It also highlights the need for more specific training data, i.e. images of difficult-to-classify classes, including cells labeled with disease information.

Classification of microscopic peripheral blood cell images using multibranch lightweight CNN-based model

Classification of microscopic peripheral blood cell images using multibranch lightweight CNN-based model

Convolution Neural Network Approaches for Cancer Cell Image Classification

Convolution Neural Network Approaches for Cancer Cell Image Classification

Image preprocessing and hyperparameter optimization on pretrained model MobileNetV2 in white blood cell image classification

White blood cells play a role in maintaining the immune system which consists of several types such as neutrophils, lymphocytes, monocytes, eosinophils and basophils. MobileNetV2 is one of the pretrained convolutional neural network (CNN) models that provides excellent advantages and performance in classifying images. In this research was conducted to find out how to apply optimization hyperparameters and the impact of image processing on white blood cell image classification using MobileNetV2, so that it is expected to find a combination of preprocessing and combination of hyperparameter values that can produce the highest accuracy value. To maximize the classification process, before classifying the image, several stages of image preprocessing are carried out, namely cropping, grayscale, resizing and augmentation. Hyperparameter tuning was carried out for an experiment to improve model performance. The three main parameters used in hyperparameter tuning are learning rate, batch size, and number of epochs. Performance optimization model performance will be measured using accuracy, sensitivity, specificity and using a confusion matrix. Based on the experimental results in this study, it shows that the best learning rate value is 0.00001, the best batch size value is 32, and the best epoch value is 250.

Classification of Acute Lymphocytic Leukemic Blood Cell Images using Hybrid CNN-Enhanced Ensemble SVM Models and Machine Learning Classifiers

Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia is a dangerous kind of malignant cancer caused due to the overproduction of white blood cells. The white blood cells in our body are responsible for fighting against infections, if the WBC increases the immunity will decrease and it would lead to serious health conditions. Malignant cancers such as ALL is life threatening if the disease is not diagnosed at an early stage. If a person is suffering from ALL the disease needs to be diagnosed at an early stage before it starts spreading, if it starts spreading the person’s chances of survival would also reduce. Here comes the need of an accurate automated system which would assist the oncologists to diagnose the disease as early as possible. In this paper some of the algorithms that are enhanced to detect and classify ALL are incorporated. In order to classify the Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia a hybrid model has been deployed to improve the accuracy of the diagnosis and it is termed as Hybrid CNN Enhanced Ensemble SVM for the classification of malignancy. Machine Learning classifiers are also used to design the system and it is then compared with enhanced CNN based on the performance metrics.

Deep learning for few-shot white blood cell image classification and feature learning

ABSTRACT Differential counting of white blood cells (WBCs) in bone marrow using artificial intelligence (AI)-based models, such as convolutional neural network (CNN) and its various variants, can help physicians to efficiently diagnose many critical diseases such as leukaemia, AIDS and cancers. In this work, we implement a deep transfer learning to several CNN models to examine their effectiveness on automatically classifying WBCs into lymphocytes and non-lymphocytes groups. Our results show that transfer learning can enhance the training of the model and improve the model performance. We also discover that using image masking to remove irrelevant image pixels can further increase the accuracy of the model predictions. Moreover, we assess the impact of three data augmentation techniques to address the imbalance in the data set, which commonly occurs in many biological applications. Our results show that all the three examined data augmentation methods improve the classification results on both training and testing data sets. Altogether, we demonstrate that deep neural networks, when combined with transfer learning and imaging processing techniques, can serve as a powerful tool to conduct automatic differential counting of WBCs, and thus facilitate the diagnosis of the WBC-related disorders, monitor the disease progression and improve the effectiveness of therapeutics.

Automated Urine Cell Image Classification Model Using Chaotic Mixer Deep Feature Extraction.

Microscopic examination of urinary sediments is a common laboratory procedure. Automated image-based classification of urinary sediments can reduce analysis time and costs. Inspired by cryptographic mixing protocols and computer vision, we developed an image classification model that combines a novel Arnold Cat Map (ACM)- and fixed-size patch-based mixer algorithm with transfer learning for deep feature extraction. Our study dataset comprised 6,687 urinary sediment images belonging to seven classes: Cast, Crystal, Epithelia, Epithelial nuclei, Erythrocyte, Leukocyte, and Mycete. The developed model consists of four layers: (1) an ACM-based mixer to generate mixed images from resized 224 ×224 input images using fixed-size 16 ×16 patches; (2) DenseNet201 pre-trained on ImageNet1K to extract 1,920 features from each raw input image, and its six corresponding mixed images were concatenated to form a final feature vector of length 13,440; (3) iterative neighborhood component analysis to select the most discriminative feature vector of optimal length 342, determined using a k-nearest neighbor (kNN)-based loss function calculator; and (4) shallow kNN-based classification with ten-fold cross-validation. Our model achieved 98.52% overall accuracy for seven-class classification, outperforming published models for urinary cell and sediment analysis. We demonstrated the feasibility and accuracy of deep feature engineering using an ACM-based mixer algorithm for image preprocessing combined with pre-trained DenseNet201 for feature extraction. The classification model was both demonstrably accurate and computationally lightweight, making it ready for implementation in real-world image-based urine sediment analysis applications.

The Effectiveness of Data Augmentation for Mature White Blood Cell Image Classification in Deep Learning — Selection of an Optimal Technique for Hematological Morphology Recognition —

The Effectiveness of Data Augmentation for Mature White Blood Cell Image Classification in Deep Learning — Selection of an Optimal Technique for Hematological Morphology Recognition —

CervixFuzzyFusion for cervical cancer cell image classification

Cervical cancer is a common type of tumor that occurs in the cervix. The cervical cells in the cervix contain millions of cells with various orientations and overlaps. It is an extensive process to segment and annotate the cytoplasm and nuclei from the unsegmented cell images for better classification. In this paper, we propose an automated computerized system to classify unsegmented cervical cell images, which is achieved by using convolutional neural networks (CNN) and vision transformer (ViT) models. CNN automatically learns the spatial hierarchy of features, improving medical image classification. ViT captures long-range dependencies in extensive image recognition applications with a sophisticated encoder and global self-attention mechanisms. A novel cervix feature fusion method (CFF) that fuses the features of the pre-trained DenseNet201 and vision transformer: shifted patch tokenization (SPT) and locality self-attention (LSA) models. This fusion helps to get both local and global features from the cervical cell images. The fuzzy feature selection (FFS) method is used to select discriminative features from the fused feature vector for better classification of the cell abnormalities. The proposed method uses unsegmented cervical cell images from the publicly available SIPaKMeD dataset. The accuracy of the proposed model achieved 96.13% greater accuracy than the state-of-the-art methods despite having a smaller dataset for unsegmented cervical cell images.