Examining blood microscopic images for leukemia is necessary when expensive equipment for flow cytometry is unavailable. Automated systems can ease the burden on medical experts for performing this examination and may be especially helpful to quickly screen a large number of patients. We present a simple, yet effective classification approach using a ResNeXt convolutional neural network with Squeeze-and-Excitation modules. The approach was evaluated in the C-NMC online challenge and achieves a weighted F1-score of 88.91 on the test set. Code is available at this https URL
@cite_5: An essential part of the diagnosis and treatment of leukemia is the visual examination of the patient's peripheral blood smear under the microscope. Morphological changes in the white blood cells are commonly used to determine the nature of the malignant cells, namely blasts. Manual techniques are labor intensive slow, subjected to error and costly. A computerized system can be used as an aiding tool for the specialist in order to improve and accelerate the morphological analysis process. This paper presents and application of feature extraction, selection and cell classification to the recognition and differentiation of normal lymphocytes versus abnormal lymphoblast cells on the image of peripheral blood smears. This is considered as a very useful procedure in the initial treatment process of leukemia patients. A computerized recognition system has been developed, and the results of its numerical verification are presented and discussed. The methodology demonstrates that the application of pattern recognition is a powerful tool for the differentiation of normal lymphocytes and acute lymphoblastic leukemia, leading to the improvement in the early effective treatment for leukemia.
@cite_15: Leukemia is a malignant neoplasm of the blood or bone marrow that affects both children and adults and remains a leading cause of death around the world. Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is the most common type of leukemia and is more common among children and young adults. ALL diagnosis through microscopic examination of the peripheral blood and bone marrow tissue samples is performed by hematologists and has been an indispensable technique long since. However, such visual examinations of blood samples are often slow and are also limited by subjective interpretations and less accurate diagnosis. The objective of this work is to improve the ALL diagnostic accuracy by analyzing morphological and textural features from the blood image using image processing. This paper aims at proposing a quantitative microscopic approach toward the discrimination of lymphoblasts (malignant) from lymphocytes (normal) in stained blood smear and bone marrow samples and to assist in the development of a computer-aided screening of ALL. Automated recognition of lymphoblasts is accomplished using image segmentation, feature extraction, and classification over light microscopic images of stained blood films. Accurate and authentic diagnosis of ALL is obtained with the use of improved segmentation methodology, prominent features, and an ensemble classifier, facilitating rapid screening of patients. Experimental results are obtained and compared over the available image data set. It is observed that an ensemble of classifiers leads to 99 accuracy in comparison with other standard classifiers, i.e., naive Bayesian (NB), K-nearest neighbor (KNN), multilayer perceptron (MLP), radial basis functional network (RBFN), and support vector machines (SVM).
@cite_16: 
Putzu and Ruberto @cite_16 use ALL-IDB and classify a number of hand-crafted features like area, compactness, roundness or area ratio between cytoplasm and nucleus with an SVM. @cite_15 and @cite_5 both use (different) private datasets and classify using an ensemble of naive Bayes, KNN, MLP, SVM and a KNN classifier respectively.