Identification of leukemia subtypes from microscopic images using convolutional neural network

Abstract

Leukemia is a fatal cancer and has two main types: Acute and chronic. Each type has two more subtypes: Lymphoid and myeloid. Hence, in total, there are four subtypes of leukemia. This study proposes a new approach for diagnosis of all subtypes of leukemia from microscopic blood cell images using convolutional neural networks (CNN), which requires a large training data set. Therefore, we also investigated the effects of data augmentation for an increasing number of training samples synthetically. We used two publicly available leukemia data sources: ALL-IDB and ASH Image Bank. Next, we applied seven different image transformation techniques as data augmentation. We designed a CNN architecture capable of recognizing all subtypes of leukemia. Besides, we also explored other well-known machine learning algorithms such as naive Bayes, support vector machine, k-nearest neighbor, and decision tree. To evaluate our approach, we set up a set of experiments and used 5-fold cross-validation. The results we obtained from experiments showed that our CNN model performance has 88.25% and 81.74% accuracy, in leukemia versus healthy and multi-class classification of all subtypes, respectively. Finally, we also showed that the CNN model has a better performance than other well-known machine learning algorithms.