High-Efficiency Classification of White Blood Cells Based on Object Detection

White blood cells classification using multi-fold pre-processing and optimized CNN model

White blood cells (WBCs) play a vital role in immune responses against infections and foreign agents. Different WBC types exist, and anomalies within them can indicate diseases like leukemia. Previous research suffers from limited accuracy and inflated performance due to the usage of less important features. Moreover, these studies often focus on fewer WBC types, exaggerating accuracy. This study addresses the crucial task of classifying WBC types using microscopic images. This study introduces a novel approach using extensive pre-processing with data augmentation techniques to produce a more significant feature set to achieve more promising results. The study conducts experiments employing both conventional deep learning and transfer learning models, comparing performance with state-of-the-art machine and deep learning models. Results reveal that a pre-processed feature set and convolutional neural network classifier achieves a significantly better accuracy of 0.99. The proposed method demonstrates superior accuracy and computational efficiency compared to existing state-of-the-art works.

Leukocyte subtype classification with multi-model fusion

Accurate classification of leukocytes is crucial for the diagnosis of hematologic malignancies, particularly leukemia. However, traditional leukocyte classification methods are time-consuming and subject to subjective interpretation by examiners. To address this issue, we aimed to develop a leukocyte classification system capable of accurately classifying 11 leukocyte classes, which would aid radiologists in diagnosing leukemia. Our proposed two-stage classification scheme involved a multi-model fusion based on ResNet for rough leukocyte classification, which focused on shape features, followed by fine-grained leukocyte classification using support vector machine for lymphocytes based on texture features. Our dataset consisted of 11,102 microscopic leukocyte images of 11 classes. Our proposed method achieved accurate leukocyte subtype classification with high levels of accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and precision of 97.03 ± 0.05, 96.76 ± 0.05, 99.65 ± 0.05, and 96.54 ± 0.05, respectively, in the test set. The experimental results demonstrate that the leukocyte classification model based on multi-model fusion can effectively classify 11 leukocyte classes, providing valuable technical support for enhancing the performance of hematology analyzers.

Nanomedicine Ex Machina: Between Model-Informed Development and Artificial Intelligence

Today, a growing number of computational aids and simulations are shaping model-informed drug development. Artificial intelligence, a family of self-learning algorithms, is only the latest emerging trend applied by academic researchers and the pharmaceutical industry. Nanomedicine successfully conquered several niche markets and offers a wide variety of innovative drug delivery strategies. Still, only a small number of patients benefit from these advanced treatments, and the number of data sources is very limited. As a consequence, “big data” approaches are not always feasible and smart combinations of human and artificial intelligence define the research landscape. These methodologies will potentially transform the future of nanomedicine and define new challenges and limitations of machine learning in their development. In our review, we present an overview of modeling and artificial intelligence applications in the development and manufacture of nanomedicines. Also, we elucidate the role of each method as a facilitator of breakthroughs and highlight important limitations.