Classifying white blood cells using combining different convolutional neural networks

Abstract White blood cells are warrior cells that protect the human body against external factors. Each of these warrior cells performs a distinct task, making every piece of information about them highly valuable in the medical field. In this article, a classification framework for the four known types of white blood cells is proposed. It is hoped that the classification of these types will contribute to the prediction of diseases such as AIDS, malaria, leukemia, and many others. In the proposed method, images of white blood cells from the Blood Cell Classification and Detection dataset were used as input to Convolutional Neural Networks. The feature vectors extracted using these Convolutional Neural Network architectures were combined into a single vector. A Minimum Redundancy Maximum Relevance algorithm was then employed to identify the most effective features within the feature vector. Experiments were conducted using these selected features, and the analysis of each experiment was reported in detail. The Support Vector Machines classifier achieved an accuracy of 98.63% in classifying white blood cell types by combining features from multiple deep learning architectures. The experimental results demonstrated that the features obtained from different layers of the Convolutional Neural Networks had varying impacts on the classification performance.