Transfer Learning with EfficientNet for Accurate Leukemia Cell Classification
It addresses early diagnosis of leukemia for medical applications, but is incremental as it combines existing methods like data augmentation and transfer learning on a specific dataset.
This study tackled the problem of classifying Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia from blood smear images by applying transfer learning with pretrained CNNs, achieving an F1-score of 94.30%, accuracy of 92.02%, and AUC of 94.79% using EfficientNet-B3.
Accurate classification of Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) from peripheral blood smear images is essential for early diagnosis and effective treatment planning. This study investigates the use of transfer learning with pretrained convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to improve diagnostic performance. To address the class imbalance in the dataset of 3,631 Hematologic and 7,644 ALL images, we applied extensive data augmentation techniques to create a balanced training set of 10,000 images per class. We evaluated several models, including ResNet50, ResNet101, and EfficientNet variants B0, B1, and B3. EfficientNet-B3 achieved the best results, with an F1-score of 94.30%, accuracy of 92.02%, andAUCof94.79%,outperformingpreviouslyreported methods in the C-NMCChallenge. Thesefindings demonstrate the effectiveness of combining data augmentation with advanced transfer learning models, particularly EfficientNet-B3, in developing accurate and robust diagnostic tools for hematologic malignancy detection.