Enhancing Disease Diagnosis: A CNN-Based Approach for Automated White Blood Cell Classification
Athanasios Kanavos, Orestis Papadimitriou, Alexios Kaponis, Manolis Μaragoudakis
Abstract
White Blood Cell (WBC) image classification is pivotal for early disease detection and diagnosis. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have emerged as potent tools for such tasks due to their ability to learn intricate features from raw pixel data. In this study, we present a CNN-based approach for automated WBC classification. Our methodology encompasses image preprocessing to enhance contrast and normalize color, succeeded by CNN training with multiple convolutional and pooling layers, thereby enabling feature acquisition from diverse WBC classes. We evaluate our approach using a publicly accessible WBC image dataset, comparing our results against other contemporary methods. Our proposed method achieves an impressive 96.2% accuracy for six distinct WBC classes, surpassing prior techniques by a considerable margin. This showcases CNNs’ potential in automated WBC classification, underscoring its significance in medical diagnosis and research. In summary, we introduce a CNN-based approach for automated WBC classification that attains state-of-the-art performance on a publicly available dataset. Our methodology encompasses image preprocessing, contrast enhancement, color normalization, and CNN training to capture distinctive features of diverse WBC classes. Our findings underscore CNNs’ promise in this domain and propose its deployment as a valuable tool in medical research and diagnosis. Subsequent efforts will explore advanced techniques like transfer learning to further elevate our method’s performance.