A Deep Learning-Based Approach for the Diagnosis of Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia

Abstract

Leukemia is a deadly disease caused by the overproduction of immature white blood cells (WBS) in the bone marrow. If leukemia is detected at the initial stages, the chances of recovery are better. Typically, morphological analysis for the identification of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is performed manually on blood cells by skilled medical personnel, which has several disadvantages, including a lack of medical personnel, sluggish analysis, and prediction that is dependent on the medical personnel’s expertise. Therefore, we proposed the Multi-Attention EfficientNetV2S and EfficientNetB3 state-of-the-art deep learning architectures using transfer learning-based fine-tuning approach to distinguish the normal and blast cells from microscopic blood smear images that both are pretrained on large-scale ImageNet database. We simply modified the last block of both models and added additional layers to both models. After including this Multi-Attention Mechanism, it not only reduces the model’s complexities but also generalizes its network quite well. By using the proposed technique, the accuracy has improved and the overall loss is also minimized. Our Multi-Attention EfficientNetV2S and EfficientNetB3 models achieved 99.73% and 99.25% accuracy, respectively. We have further compared the proposed model’s performance to other individual and ensemble models. Upon comparison, the proposed model outclassed the existing literature and other benchmark models, thus proving its efficiency.