CLASSIFICATION OF ACUTE LYMPHOBLASTIC LEUKEMIA CELLS USING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Due to the morphological similarity between immature lymphoblasts (cancerous cells) to lymphocytes (non-cancerous cells), detecting Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia poses a significant challenge for pathologists. These cells, which exhibit a similar pattern, can lead to various errors during the diagnosis of the disease. In this study, the cancerous and non-cancerous cells were classified using 3 different artificial intelligence approaches. In the first approach, the classification process was carried out by training Convolutional Neural Networks in 4 different architectures. In the second approach, a hybrid approach was proposed by combining the convolution layer of the CNN model as the feature extractor with the Support Vector Machine, Naive Bayes and Random Forest algorithms as the classifier. The classification processes were carried out by training the proposed second approach. In the third approach, the classification process was performed using transfer learning process and ResNet50 and VGG16 networks. In all experiments, the effects of hyper-parameter and dataset changes on model performance were also examined. The results obtained by these three approaches were compared using the Accuracy, Precision, Recall, F-score, and AUC performance measures. It was determined that the most successful results were obtained with the 1st approach using the Dataset3.