Investigation of white blood cell biomaker model for acute lymphoblastic leukemia detection based on convolutional neural network

Abstract

Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) is a disease that is defined by uncontrollable growth of malignant and immature White Blood Cells (WBCs) which is called lymphoblast. Traditionally, lymphoblast analysis is done manually and highly dependent on the pathologist’s skill and  experience which sometimes yields inaccurate result. For that reason, in this project an algorithm to automatically detect WBC and subsequently examine ALL disease using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is proposed. Several pretrained CNN models which are VGG, GoogleNet and Alexnet were analaysed to compare its performance for differentiating lymphoblast and non-lymphoblast cells from IDB database. The tuning is done by experimenting the convolution layer, pooling layer and fully connected layer. Technically, 70% of the images are used for training and another 30% for testing. From the experiments, it is found that the best pretrained models are VGG and GoogleNet compared to AlexNet by achieving 100% accuracy for training. As for testing, VGG obtained the highest performance which is 99.13% accuracy. Apart from that, VGG also proven to have better result based on the training graph which is more stable and contains less error compared to the other two models.