ALLNet: A Hybrid Convolutional Neural Network to Improve Diagnosis of Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia (ALL) in White Blood Cells

TL;DR

ALLNet, a hybrid CNN combining VGG, ResNet, and Inception, significantly improves the accuracy and reliability of diagnosing Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia from blood cell images, aiding clinical diagnosis.

Contribution

The paper introduces ALLNet, a novel hybrid CNN architecture that outperforms individual models in leukemia diagnosis from microscopic images.

Findings

ALLNet achieved over 92% accuracy in cross-validation and test sets.

ALLNet demonstrated high sensitivity and F1 scores, indicating reliable detection.

The model's performance suggests potential for clinical application in leukemia diagnosis.

Abstract

Due to morphological similarity at the microscopic level, making an accurate and time-sensitive distinction between blood cells affected by Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia (ALL) and their healthy counterparts calls for the usage of machine learning architectures. However, three of the most common models, VGG, ResNet, and Inception, each come with their own set of flaws with room for improvement which demands the need for a superior model. ALLNet, the proposed hybrid convolutional neural network architecture, consists of a combination of the VGG, ResNet, and Inception models. The ALL Challenge dataset of ISBI 2019 (available here) contains 10,691 images of white blood cells which were used to train and test the models. 7,272 of the images in the dataset are of cells with ALL and 3,419 of them are of healthy cells. Of the images, 60% were used to train the model, 20% were used for the cross-validation set, and 20% were used for the test set. ALLNet outperformed the VGG, ResNet, and the Inception models across the board, achieving an accuracy of 92.6567%, a sensitivity of 95.5304%, a specificity of 85.9155%, an AUC score of 0.966347, and an F1 score of 0.94803 in the cross-validation set. In the test set, ALLNet achieved an accuracy of 92.0991%, a sensitivity of 96.5446%, a specificity of 82.8035%, an AUC score of 0.959972, and an F1 score of 0.942963. The utilization of ALLNet in the clinical workspace can better treat the thousands of people suffering from ALL across the world, many of whom are children.