Stain-aware Domain Alignment for Imbalance Blood Cell Classification
This addresses accurate blood cell identification for hematological disease diagnosis, but it is incremental as it builds on existing domain adaptation and imbalance techniques.
The paper tackles domain shift and data imbalance in blood cell image classification by proposing SADA, a method that uses stain-aware domain alignment and contrastive learning, achieving state-of-the-art results on multiple datasets.
Blood cell identification is critical for hematological analysis as it aids physicians in diagnosing various blood-related diseases. In real-world scenarios, blood cell image datasets often present the issues of domain shift and data imbalance, posing challenges for accurate blood cell identification. To address these issues, we propose a novel blood cell classification method termed SADA via stain-aware domain alignment. The primary objective of this work is to mine domain-invariant features in the presence of domain shifts and data imbalances. To accomplish this objective, we propose a stain-based augmentation approach and a local alignment constraint to learn domain-invariant features. Furthermore, we propose a domain-invariant supervised contrastive learning strategy to capture discriminative features. We decouple the training process into two stages of domain-invariant feature learning and classification training, alleviating the problem of data imbalance. Experiment results on four public blood cell datasets and a private real dataset collected from the Third Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University demonstrate that SADA can achieve a new state-of-the-art baseline, which is superior to the existing cutting-edge methods with a big margin. The source code can be available at the URL (\url{https://github.com/AnoK3111/SADA}).