Feature Fusion Based Ensemble of Deep Networks for Acute Leukemia Diagnosis Using Microscopic Smear Images

Abstract

A type of blood malignancies known as leukemia leads to elevated quantities of abnormally formed blood cells and often originates in the bone marrow. An abrupt rise in the quantity of immature blood cells is one of the distinctive characteristics of acute leukemia, that predominantly affects both children and adults. The possibility exists to drastically lower the death rate associated with acute leukemia through early detection and diagnosis. A significant and time-consuming task for the early detection of acute leukemia is microscopic examination of blood cells. In this paper, a two-staged deep learning-based computer-aided diagnosis system regarding microscopic blood smear images is proposed to assist hematologists and improve the diagnosis accuracy of acute leukemia in which for the feature fusion-based ensemble, two deep neural network branches adopting pretrained, fine-tuned EfficientNetB7 and MobileNetV3Large architectures were employed, and feature maps generated from those branches were fused and fed to the second stage of the architecture to achieve the final result. Additional dropout layers and ReLu activation were employed in the architecture to speed up the network, and compound scaling, bottleneck, and fusion architectures enhanced the overall performance. The ALLIDB1, ALLIDB2, and ASH databases were incorporated to evaluate the performances of the proposed method. The experimental findings demonstrated that the proposed approach detected acute leukemia (ALL, AML, Healthy) with an accuracy of 99.3%, F1-score of 99.3%, and AUC score of 0.997. Whereas in detecting acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL, Healthy) and acute myeloid leukemia (AML, Healthy), the accuracies reached 100.0% and 99.8%, respectively. Thus, we believe that clinics can adopt our proposed architecture for quick and automated diagnosis.