Deep Learning-Based Blood Cell Classification with Enhanced Data Preprocessing and Augmentation
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Abstract
Classification of blood cells accurately is an extremely important task in the field of hematology, for the diagnosis of blood disorders and for guiding decision making in the clinical context. In this paper, we use a high-quality dataset of 17,092 microscopic peripheral blood cell images from the Hospital Clinic of Barcelona, encompassing eight different cell types, all of which have been annotated by expert pathologists. To improve model performance and to tackle the class imbalance in the dataset, we developed a strong data preprocessing and data augmentation pipeline which includes contrast enhancement, normalization, geometric and photometric transformations, injection of noise, and mixup style synthetic data. We develop two state-of-the-art deep learning models (EfficientNet-B0, ResNet50) to enable benchmarking of the proposed pipeline. In our experimental results, EfficientNet-B0 achieved overall accuracy of approximately 98.3% and ResNet50 achieved accuracy of 98.6%, with very good precision, recall, and F1-scores for all classes. These preliminary results demonstrate the effectiveness of the designed data preprocessing and data augmentation strategies, as well as provide a benchmark for managing blood cell images in hematology for future research.
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References
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