Explainable Multiclass Blood Cell Classification: Combining Custom CNNs with SHAP

Blood cell classification is a crucial task in medical diagnostics. This work can identify different blood cell types that play essential roles in the immune system and overall body function. This research introduces a custom Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model with SHAP for explainable multiclass classification of blood cell images. We classify eight types of blood cells—basophil, eosinophil, erythroblast, immunoglobulin (Ig), lymphocyte, monocyte, neutrophil, and platelet. An ablation study was conducted to optimize the CNN architecture. We compared its performance with eleven transfer learning models, including VGG16, ResNet101, and EfficientNet variants. Our model achieved 92.60% accuracy while maintaining lower complexity. The use of SHAP provides transparency by highlighting crucial features in the model’s decision-making process.