Subclass Separation of White Blood Cell Images Using Convolutional Neural Network Models

The white blood cells produced in the bone marrow and lymphoid tissue known as leucocytes are an important part of the immune system to protect the body against foreign invaders and infectious disease. These cells, which do not have color, have a few days or several weeks of life. A lot of clinic experience is required for a doctor to detect the amount of white blood cells in human blood and classify it. Thus, early and accurate diagnosis can be made in the formation of various disease types, including infection on the immune system, such as anemia and leukemia, while evaluating and determining the disease of a patient. The white blood cells can be separated into four subclasses, such as Eosinophil, Lymphocyte, Monocyte, and Neutrophil. This study focuses on the separation of the white blood cell images by the classification process using convolutional neural network models, which is a deep learning model. A deep learning network, which is slow in the training step due to the complex architecture, but fast in the test step, is used for the feature extraction instead of intricate methods. For the subclass separation of white blood cells, the experimental results show that the AlexNet architecture gives the correct recognition rate among the convolutional neural network architectures tested in the study. Various classifiers are performed on the features derived from the AlexNet architecture to evaluate the classification performance. The best performance in the classification of white blood cells is given by the quadratic discriminant analysis classifier with the accuracy of 97.78 %.