Microscopic image enhancement for accurate sickle cell disease identification using intuitionistic fuzzy driven retinex

Sickle cell disease (SCD) is a debilitating genetic blood disorder that must be identified and diagnosed early for effective treatment planning. Several factors hinder early identification in microscopic images, including uneven blood smears, lack of focus during capture, inconsistent illumination, and improper microscope settings. This paper addresses the aforementioned factors using the Intuitionistic Fuzzy-Driven Retinex (IFDR) method. The work contains two phases: microscopic image enhancement using IFDR and classification using DenseNet121. IFDR is a hybrid model that combines the Intuitionistic Fuzzy Index (IFI) with Single-Scale Retinex (SSR) to enhance uncertainty modeling and correct illumination variations in microscopic images. The IFI module enhances structural details and contrast in local area, while the SSR component performs global illumination balancing, resulting in diagnostically improved images. The enhanced images provide richer visual information, including clearer sickle cell edges, improved detection of overlapping cells, higher contrast, and less noise. For sickle cell identification, the enhanced images are used instead of the original images to train and test the DenseNet121 model, achieving competitive accuracy. The dataset used in this study was obtained from Kaggle. The performance of the proposed model is compared to the original and enhanced images. The classification accuracy for the original image is 0.877, whereas the proposed enhancement technique yields an accuracy of 0.964 for sickle cell identification. Comprehensive ablation studies were performed, confirming the superiority of the proposed hybrid method over its individual components. From experimental results, it is observed that the enhanced images yield better performance than the fine-tuned models and state of the art methods. Further, Grad-Cam-based explainable AI is employed to interpret the model classification results on enhanced images.