Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia Classification from Microscopic Images using Convolutional Neural Networks
This work addresses the need for automated leukemia screening in resource-limited settings, offering a practical solution to reduce expert workload, though it is incremental as it builds on existing CNN architectures.
The paper tackled the problem of classifying Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia from microscopic images by developing a ResNeXt CNN with Squeeze-and-Excitation modules, achieving a weighted F1-score of 88.91% on a test set from the C-NMC challenge.
Examining blood microscopic images for leukemia is necessary when expensive equipment for flow cytometry is unavailable. Automated systems can ease the burden on medical experts for performing this examination and may be especially helpful to quickly screen a large number of patients. We present a simple, yet effective classification approach using a ResNeXt convolutional neural network with Squeeze-and-Excitation modules. The approach was evaluated in the C-NMC online challenge and achieves a weighted F1-score of 88.91% on the test set. Code is available at https://github.com/jprellberg/isbi2019cancer