ConcatNeXt: An automated blood cell classification with a new deep convolutional neural network
Mehmet Erten, Prabal Datta Barua, Şengül Doğan, Türker Tuncer, Ru‐San Tan, U. Rajendra Acharya
Abstract
Abstract Examining peripheral blood smears is valuable in clinical settings, yet manual identification of blood cells proves time-consuming. To address this, an automated blood cell image classification system is crucial. Our objective is to develop a precise automated model for detecting various blood cell types, leveraging a novel deep learning architecture. We harnessed a publicly available dataset of 17,092 blood cell images categorized into eight classes. Our innovation lies in ConcatNeXt, a new convolutional neural network. In the spirit of Geoffrey Hinton's approach, we adapted ConvNeXt by substituting the Gaussian error linear unit with a rectified linear unit and layer normalization with batch normalization. We introduced depth concatenation blocks to fuse information effectively and incorporated a patchify layer. Integrating ConcatNeXt with nested patch-based deep feature engineering, featuring downstream iterative neighborhood component analysis and support vector machine-based functions, establishes a comprehensive approach. ConcatNeXt achieved notable validation and test accuracies of 97.43% and 97.77%, respectively. The ConcatNeXt-based feature engineering model further elevated accuracy to 98.73%. Gradient-weighted class activation maps were employed to provide interpretability, offering valuable insights into model decision-making. Our proposed ConcatNeXt and nested patch-based deep feature engineering models excel in blood cell image classification, showcasing remarkable classification performances. These innovations mark significant strides in computer vision-based blood cell analysis.