journal article·2021-11-12Open access

An Attention-Based Convolutional Neural Network for Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia Classification

Muhammad Zakir Ullah, Yuanjie Zheng, Jingqi Song, Sehrish Aslam, Chenxi Xu, Gogo Dauda Kiazolu, Liping Wang

Applied Sciences· Volume 11· Issue 22

Abstract

Leukemia is a kind of blood cancer that influences people of all ages and is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is the most widely recognized type of leukemia found in the bone marrow of the human body. Traditional disease diagnostic techniques like blood and bone marrow examinations are slow and painful, resulting in the demand for non-invasive and fast methods. This work presents a non-invasive, convolutional neural network (CNN) based approach that utilizes medical images to perform the diagnosis task. The proposed solution consisting of a CNN-based model uses an attention module called Efficient Channel Attention (ECA) with the visual geometry group from oxford (VGG16) to extract better quality deep features from the image dataset, leading to better feature representation and better classification results. The proposed method shows that the ECA module helps to overcome morphological similarities between ALL cancer and healthy cell images. Various augmentation techniques are also employed to increase the quality and quantity of training data. We used the classification of normal vs. malignant cells (C-NMC) dataset and divided it into seven folds based on subject-level variability, which is usually ignored in previous methods. Experimental results show that our proposed CNN model can successfully extract deep features and achieved an accuracy of 91.1%. The obtained findings show that the proposed method may be utilized to diagnose ALL and would help pathologists.
Source: crossref · Quality: baseline

Research context

OpenAlex topics: Digital Imaging for Blood Diseases · AI in cancer detection · COVID-19 diagnosis using AI

SciVX discovery tags are terminology-based. OpenAlex topics are source-provided classifications.

Affiliations

School of Information Science and Engineering, Shandong Normal University, Jinan 250358, China

Director of Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory of Higher Education, Dean of School of Information Science and Engineering, Vice President of Life and Health Research Institute, Shandong Normal University, Jinan 250358, China

Funding

Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province · Taishan Scholar Project of Shandong Province · National Natural Science Foundation of China

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