Leukocytes identification using augmentation and transfer learning based convolution neural network

Most haematological diseases can be diagnosed using the morphological analysis of the microscopic blood image. The basic routine of the morphological analysis can be performed using the microscopic device which requires the skills and experiences of the haematologists. An inexperienced haematologist can lead to critical human errors. Therefore, this paper aims to propose an automated classification system used to classify different types of leukocytes based on the convolution neural network (CNN) algorithm. CNN has achieved robust performance in various fields especially in medical applications. A dataset of microscopic blood cells images of the conforming tags (basophil, eosinophil, erythroblast, lymphocyte, monocyte, neutrophil, and platelet) was used to train and test the proposed algorithm. The augmentation and deep transfer approaches were used to improve and enhance the performance of the CNN algorithm. The overall accuracy of the proposed classifier was 98% with Visual Geometry Group-19 (VGG-19). The obtained accuracy was higher than the state-of-art algorithms. To conclude that using the augmentation and deep transfer approaches with VGG-19 can obtain better classification results.