Automated Detection of Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia From Microscopic Images Based on Human Visual Perception

Application of image recognition technology in pathological diagnosis of blood smears

Traditional manual blood smear diagnosis methods are time-consuming and prone to errors, often relying heavily on the experience of clinical laboratory analysts for accuracy. As breakthroughs in key technologies such as neural networks and deep learning continue to drive digital transformation in the medical field, image recognition technology is increasingly being leveraged to enhance existing medical processes. In recent years, advancements in computer technology have led to improved efficiency in the identification of blood cells in blood smears through the use of image recognition technology. This paper provides a comprehensive summary of the methods and steps involved in utilizing image recognition algorithms for diagnosing diseases in blood smears, with a focus on malaria and leukemia. Furthermore, it offers a forward-looking research direction for the development of a comprehensive blood cell pathological detection system.

Schistocyte detection in artificial intelligence age

Schistocytes are fragmented red blood cells produced as a result of mechanical damage to erythrocytes, usually due to microangiopathic thrombotic diseases or mechanical factors. The early laboratory detection of schistocytes has a critical impact on the timely diagnosis, effective treatment, and positive prognosis of diseases such as thrombocytopenic purpura and hemolytic uremic syndrome. Due to the rapid development of science and technology, laboratory hematology has also advanced. The accuracy and efficiency of tests performed by fully automated hematology analyzers and fully automated morphology analyzers have been considerably improved. In recent years, substantial improvements in computing power and machine learning (ML) algorithm development have dramatically extended the limits of the potential of autonomous machines. The rapid development of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) has led to the iteration and upgrade of automated detection of schistocytes. However, along with significantly facilitated operation processes, AI has brought challenges. This review summarizes the progress in laboratory schistocyte detection, the relationship between schistocytes and clinical diseases, and the progress of AI in the detection of schistocytes. In addition, current challenges and possible solutions are discussed, as well as the great potential of AI techniques for schistocyte testing in peripheral blood.

ALL classification using neural ensemble and memetic deep feature optimization

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is a fatal blood disorder characterized by the excessive proliferation of immature white blood cells, originating in the bone marrow. An effective prognosis and treatment of ALL calls for its accurate and timely detection. Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown promising results in digital pathology. However, they face challenges in classifying different subtypes of leukemia due to their subtle morphological differences. This study proposes an improved pipeline for binary detection and sub-type classification of ALL from blood smear images. At first, a customized, 88 layers deep CNN is proposed and trained using transfer learning along with GoogleNet CNN to create an ensemble of features. Furthermore, this study models the feature selection problem as a combinatorial optimization problem and proposes a memetic version of binary whale optimization algorithm, incorporating Differential Evolution-based local search method to enhance the exploration and exploitation of feature search space. The proposed approach is validated using publicly available standard datasets containing peripheral blood smear images of various classes of ALL. An overall best average accuracy of 99.15% is achieved for binary classification of ALL with an 85% decrease in the feature vector, together with 99% precision and 98.8% sensitivity. For B-ALL sub-type classification, the best accuracy of 98.69% is attained with 98.7% precision and 99.57% specificity. The proposed methodology shows better performance metrics as compared with several existing studies.

An efficient decision support system for leukemia identification utilizing nature-inspired deep feature optimization

In the field of medicine, decision support systems play a crucial role by harnessing cutting-edge technology and data analysis to assist doctors in disease diagnosis and treatment. Leukemia is a malignancy that emerges from the uncontrolled growth of immature white blood cells within the human body. An accurate and prompt diagnosis of leukemia is desired due to its swift progression to distant parts of the body. Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is an aggressive type of leukemia that affects both children and adults. Computer vision-based identification of leukemia is challenging due to structural irregularities and morphological similarities of blood entities. Deep neural networks have shown promise in extracting valuable information from image datasets, but they have high computational costs due to their extensive feature sets. This work presents an efficient pipeline for binary and subtype classification of acute lymphoblastic leukemia. The proposed method first unveils a novel neighborhood pixel transformation method using differential evolution to improve the clarity and discriminability of blood cell images for better analysis. Next, a hybrid feature extraction approach is presented leveraging transfer learning from selected deep neural network models, InceptionV3 and DenseNet201, to extract comprehensive feature sets. To optimize feature selection, a customized binary Grey Wolf Algorithm is utilized, achieving an impressive 80% reduction in feature size while preserving key discriminative information. These optimized features subsequently empower multiple classifiers, potentially capturing diverse perspectives and amplifying classification accuracy. The proposed pipeline is validated on publicly available standard datasets of ALL images. For binary classification, the best average accuracy of 98.1% is achieved with 98.1% sensitivity and 98% precision. For ALL subtype classifications, the best accuracy of 98.14% was attained with 78.5% sensitivity and 98% precision. The proposed feature selection method shows a better convergence behavior as compared to classical population-based meta-heuristics. The suggested solution also demonstrates comparable or better performance in comparison to several existing techniques.

Hybrid Feature-Learning-Based PSO-PCA Feature Engineering Approach for Blood Cancer Classification

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is a lethal blood cancer that is characterized by an abnormal increased number of immature lymphocytes in the blood or bone marrow. For effective treatment of ALL, early assessment of the disease is essential. Manual examination of stained blood smear images is current practice for initially screening ALL. This practice is time-consuming and error-prone. In order to effectively diagnose ALL, numerous deep-learning-based computer vision systems have been developed for detecting ALL in blood peripheral images (BPIs). Such systems extract a huge number of image features and use them to perform the classification task. The extracted features may contain irrelevant or redundant features that could reduce classification accuracy and increase the running time of the classifier. Feature selection is considered an effective tool to mitigate the curse of the dimensionality problem and alleviate its corresponding shortcomings. One of the most effective dimensionality-reduction tools is principal component analysis (PCA), which maps input features into an orthogonal space and extracts the features that convey the highest variability from the data. Other feature selection approaches utilize evolutionary computation (EC) to search the feature space and localize optimal features. To profit from both feature selection approaches in improving the classification performance of ALL, in this study, a new hybrid deep-learning-based feature engineering approach is proposed. The introduced approach integrates the powerful capability of PCA and particle swarm optimization (PSO) approaches in selecting informative features from BPI mages with the power of pre-trained CNNs of feature extraction. Image features are first extracted through the feature-transfer capability of the GoogleNet convolutional neural network (CNN). PCA is utilized to generate a feature set of the principal components that covers 95% of the variability in the data. In parallel, bio-inspired particle swarm optimization is used to search for the optimal image features. The PCA and PSO-derived feature sets are then integrated to develop a hybrid set of features that are then used to train a Bayesian-based optimized support vector machine (SVM) and subspace discriminant ensemble-learning (SDEL) classifiers. The obtained results show improved classification performance for the ML classifiers trained by the proposed hybrid feature set over the original PCA, PSO, and all extracted feature sets for ALL multi-class classification. The Bayesian-optimized SVM trained with the proposed hybrid PCA-PSO feature set achieves the highest classification accuracy of 97.4%. The classification performance of the proposed feature engineering approach competes with the state of the art.

A high-resolution large-scale dataset of pathological and normal white blood cells

Microscopic examination plays a significant role in the initial screening for a variety of hematological, as well as non-hematological, diagnoses. Microscopic blood smear examination that is considered a key diagnostic technique, is in recent clinical practice still performed manually, which is not only time consuming, but can lead to human errors. Although automated and semi-automated systems have been developed in recent years, their high purchasing and maintenance costs make them unaffordable for many medical institutions. Even though much research has been conducted lately to explore more accurate and feasible solutions, most researchers had to deal with a lack of medical data. To address the lack of large-scale databases in this field, we created a high-resolution dataset containing a total of 16027 annotated white blood cells. Moreover, the dataset covers overall 9 types of white blood cells, including clinically significant pathological findings. Since we used high-quality acquisition equipment, the dataset provides one of the highest quality images of blood cells, achieving an approximate resolution of 42 pixels per 1 μm.

ResRandSVM: Hybrid Approach for Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia Classification in Blood Smear Images

Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia is a type of cancer that occurs when abnormal white blood cells are produced in the bone marrow which do not function properly, crowding out healthy cells and weakening the immunity of the body and thus its ability to resist infections. It spreads quickly in children's bodies, and if not treated promptly it may lead to death. The manual detection of this disease is a tedious and slow task. Machine learning and deep learning techniques are faster than manual detection and more accurate. In this paper, a deep feature selection-based approach ResRandSVM is proposed for the detection of Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia in blood smear images. The proposed approach uses seven deep-learning models: ResNet152, VGG16, DenseNet121, MobileNetV2, InceptionV3, EfficientNetB0 and ResNet50 for deep feature extraction from blood smear images. After that, three feature selection methods are used to extract valuable and important features: analysis of variance (ANOVA), principal component analysis (PCA), and Random Forest. Then the selected feature map is fed to four different classifiers, Adaboost, Support Vector Machine, Artificial Neural Network and Naïve Bayes models, to classify the images into leukemia and normal images. The model performs best with a combination of ResNet50 as a feature extractor, Random Forest as feature selection and Support Vector Machine as a classifier with an accuracy of 0.900, precision of 0.902, recall of 0.957 and F1-score of 0.929.

Hematology and Machine Learning

BACKGROUND

Substantial improvements in computational power and machine learning (ML) algorithm development have vastly increased the limits of what autonomous machines are capable of. Since its beginnings in the 19th century, laboratory hematology has absorbed waves of progress yielding improvements in both of accuracy and efficiency. The next wave of change in laboratory hematology will be the result of the ML revolution that has already touched many corners of healthcare and society at large.

CONTENT

This review will describe the manifestations of ML and artificial intelligence (AI) already utilized in the clinical hematology laboratory. This will be followed by a topical summary of the innovative and investigational applications of this technology in each of the major subdomains within laboratory hematology.

SUMMARY

Application of this technology to laboratory hematology will increase standardization and efficiency by reducing laboratory staff involvement in automatable activities. This will unleash time and resources for focus on more meaningful activities such as the complexities of patient care, research and development, and process improvement.

BO-ALLCNN: Bayesian-Based Optimized CNN for Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia Detection in Microscopic Blood Smear Images

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is a deadly cancer characterized by aberrant accumulation of immature lymphocytes in the blood or bone marrow. Effective treatment of ALL is strongly associated with the early diagnosis of the disease. Current practice for initial ALL diagnosis is performed through manual evaluation of stained blood smear microscopy images, which is a time-consuming and error-prone process. Deep learning-based human-centric biomedical diagnosis has recently emerged as a powerful tool for assisting physicians in making medical decisions. Therefore, numerous computer-aided diagnostic systems have been developed to autonomously identify ALL in blood images. In this study, a new Bayesian-based optimized convolutional neural network (CNN) is introduced for the detection of ALL in microscopic smear images. To promote classification performance, the architecture of the proposed CNN and its hyperparameters are customized to input data through the Bayesian optimization approach. The Bayesian optimization technique adopts an informed iterative procedure to search the hyperparameter space for the optimal set of network hyperparameters that minimizes an objective error function. The proposed CNN is trained and validated using a hybrid dataset which is formed by integrating two public ALL datasets. Data augmentation has been adopted to further supplement the hybrid image set to boost classification performance. The Bayesian search-derived optimal CNN model recorded an improved performance of image-based ALL classification on test set. The findings of this study reveal the superiority of the proposed Bayesian-optimized CNN over other optimized deep learning ALL classification models.

A Review of Artificial Intelligence Applications in Hematology Management: Current Practices and Future Prospects

Background

Machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) methods have recently garnered a great deal of attention in the field of cancer research by making a noticeable contribution to the growth of predictive medicine and modern oncological practices. Considerable focus has been particularly directed toward hematologic malignancies because of the complexity in detecting early symptoms. Many patients with blood cancer do not get properly diagnosed until their cancer has reached an advanced stage with limited treatment prospects. Hence, the state-of-the-art revolves around the latest artificial intelligence (AI) applications in hematology management.

Objective

This comprehensive review provides an in-depth analysis of the current AI practices in the field of hematology. Our objective is to explore the ML and DL applications in blood cancer research, with a special focus on the type of hematologic malignancies and the patient’s cancer stage to determine future research directions in blood cancer.

Methods

We searched a set of recognized databases (Scopus, Springer, and Web of Science) using a selected number of keywords. We included studies written in English and published between 2015 and 2021. For each study, we identified the ML and DL techniques used and highlighted the performance of each model.

Results

Using the aforementioned inclusion criteria, the search resulted in 567 papers, of which 144 were selected for review.

Conclusions

The current literature suggests that the application of AI in the field of hematology has generated impressive results in the screening, diagnosis, and treatment stages. Nevertheless, optimizing the patient’s pathway to treatment requires a prior prediction of the malignancy based on the patient’s symptoms or blood records, which is an area that has still not been properly investigated.

Detecting Malignant Leukemia Cells Using Microscopic Blood Smear Images: A Deep Learning Approach

Leukemia is a form of blood cancer that develops when the human body’s bone marrow contains too many white blood cells. This medical condition affects adults and is considered a prevalent form of cancer in children. Treatment for leukaemia is determined by the type and the extent to which cancer has developed across the body. It is crucial to diagnose leukaemia early in order to provide adequate care and to cure patients. Researchers have been working on advanced diagnostics systems based on Machine Learning (ML) approaches to diagnose leukaemia early. In this research, we employ deep learning (DL) based convolutional neural network (CNN) and hybridized two individual blocks of CNN named CNN-1 and CNN-2 to detect acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL), acute myeloid leukaemia (AML), and multiple myeloma (MM). The proposed model detects malignant leukaemia cells using microscopic blood smear images. We construct a dataset of about 4150 images from a public directory. The main challenges were background removal, ripping out un-essential blood components of blood supplies, reduce the noise and blurriness and minimal method for image segmentation. To accomplish the pre-processing and segmentation, we transform RGB color-space into the greyscale 8-bit mode, enhancing the contrast of images using the image intensity adjustment method and adaptive histogram equalisation (AHE) method. We increase the structure and sharpness of images by multiplication of binary image with the output of enhanced images. In the next step, complement is done to get the background in black colour and nucleus of blood in white colour. Thereafter, we applied area operation and closing operation to remove background noise. Finally, we multiply the final output to source image to regenerate the images dataset in RGB colour space, and we resize dataset images to [400, 400]. After applying all methods and techniques, we have managed to get noiseless, non-blurred, sharped and segmented images of the lesion. In next step, enhanced segmented images are given as input to CNNs. Two parallel CCN models are trained, which extract deep features. The extracted features are further combined using the Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) fusion method to get more prominent features. We used five classification algorithms, namely, SVM, Bagging ensemble, total boosts, RUSBoost, and fine KNN, to evaluate the performance of feature extraction algorithms. Among the classification algorithms, Bagging ensemble outperformed the other algorithms by achieving the highest accuracy of 97.04%.

Deep features aggregation-based joint segmentation of cytoplasm and nuclei in white blood cells

White blood cells (WBCs), also known as leukocytes, are one of the valuable parts of the blood and immune system. Typically, pathologists use microscope for the manual inspection of blood smears which is a time-consuming, error-prone, and labor-intensive procedure. To address these issues, we present two novel shallow networks: a leukocyte deep segmentation network (LDS-Net) and leukocyte deep aggregation segmentation network (LDAS-Net) for the joint segmentation of cytoplasm and nuclei in WBC images. LDS-Net is a shallow architecture with three downsampling stages and seven convolution layers. LDAS-Net is an extended version of LDS-Net that utilizes a novel pool-less low-level information transfer bridge to transfer low-level information to the deep layers of the network. This information is aggregated with deep features in a dense feature concatenation block to achieve accurate cytoplasm and nuclei joint segmentation. We evaluated our developed architectures on four WBC publicly available datasets. For cytoplasmic segmentation in WBCs, the proposed method achieved the dice coefficients of 98.97%, 99.0%, 96.05%, and 98.79% on Datasets 1, 2, 3, and 4, respectively. For nuclei segmentation, the dice coefficients of 96.35% and 98.09% are achieved for Datasets 1 and 2, respectively. Proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods with superior computational efficiency and requires only 6.5 million trainable parameters.

Recognition of bovine milk somatic cells based on multi-feature extraction and a GBDT-AdaBoost fusion model

Traditional laboratory microscopy for identifying bovine milk somatic cells is subjective, time-consuming, and labor-intensive. The accuracy of the recognition directly through a single classifier is low. In this paper, a novel algorithm that combined the feature extraction algorithm and fusion classification model was proposed to identify the somatic cells. First, 392 cell images from four types of bovine milk somatic cells dataset were trained and tested. Secondly, filtering and the K-means method were used to preprocess and segment the images. Thirdly, the color, morphological, and texture features of the four types of cells were extracted, totaling 100 features. Finally, the gradient boosting decision tree (GBDT)-AdaBoost fusion model was proposed. For the GBDT classifier, the light gradient boosting machine (LightGBM) was used as the weak classifier. The decision tree (DT) was used as the weak classifier of the AdaBoost classifier. The results showed that the average recognition accuracy of the GBDT-AdaBoost reached 98.0%. At the same time, that of random forest (RF), extremely randomized tree (ET), DT, and LightGBM was 79.9, 71.1, 67.3 and 77.2%, respectively. The recall rate of the GBDT-AdaBoost model was the best performance on all types of cells. The F1-Score of the GBDT-AdaBoost model was also better than the results of any single classifiers. The proposed algorithm can effectively recognize the image of bovine milk somatic cells. Moreover, it may provide a reference for recognizing bovine milk somatic cells with similar shape size characteristics and is difficult to distinguish.

Investigating the cellular responses of osteosarcoma to cisplatin by confocal Raman microspectroscopy

Confocal Raman Microspectroscopy (CRM) was employed to clarify the cellular response of cisplatin in osteosarcoma (OS) cells with different dosages and incubation times. The K7M2 mouse osteosarcoma cells were treated by cisplatin in 0 μM (UT group), 20 μM (20 T group), and 40 μM (40 T group) doses for 24-h (24H group) and 48-h (48H group), respectively. Raman spectroscopy was utilized to analyze the drug induced variations of intracellular biochemical components in osteosarcoma cells. The spectral results shows that the main changes in its biochemical composition come from nucleic acids. By adopting three different kernel functions (linear, polynomial, and Gaussian radial basis function (RBF)), principal component analysis combined with support vector machine models (PCA-SVM) was built to address the spectral variations among all investigated groups. Meanwhile, multivariate curve resolution alternating least squares (MCR-ALS) was further utilized to discuss on the chemical interpretation on the acquired spectral results. Moreover, Raman spectral images, which is reconstructed by K-means cluster analysis (KCA) with point-scanned hyperspectral dataset, was applied to illustrate the drug induced compositional and morphological variations in each subcellular region. The achieved results not only prove the application potential of Raman based analytical technique in non-labeled intracellular studies, but also illustrate the detailed compositional and structural information of cisplatin induced OS cell responses from the perspective of multivariate analysis and imaging of Raman spectroscopy.

Hybrid Inception v3 XGBoost Model for Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia Classification

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is the most common type of pediatric malignancy which accounts for 25% of all pediatric cancers. It is a life-threatening disease which if left untreated can cause death within a few weeks. Many computerized methods have been proposed for the detection of ALL from microscopic cell images. In this paper, we propose a hybrid Inception v3 XGBoost model for the classification of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) from microscopic white blood cell images. In the proposed model, Inception v3 acts as the image feature extractor and the XGBoost model acts as the classification head. Experiments indicate that the proposed model performs better than the other methods identified in literature. The proposed hybrid model achieves a weighted F1 score of 0.986. Through experiments, we demonstrate that using an XGBoost classification head instead of a softmax classification head improves classification performance for this dataset for several different CNN backbones (feature extractors). We also visualize the attention map of the features extracted by Inception v3 to interpret the features learnt by the proposed model.