Transfer Learning with EfficientNet for Accurate Leukemia Cell Classification

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that transfer learning with EfficientNet-B3, combined with data augmentation, significantly improves the accuracy of leukemia cell classification from blood smear images, outperforming previous methods.

Contribution

It introduces an effective approach using EfficientNet-B3 and data augmentation to enhance leukemia classification accuracy from blood images.

Findings

EfficientNet-B3 achieved 94.30% F1-score.

Data augmentation balanced the dataset effectively.

Model outperformed previous methods in the C-NMC Challenge.

Abstract

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.