Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia Detection and Classification of Its Subtypes Using Pretrained Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Leukemia is a fatal disease of white blood cells which affects the blood and bone marrow in human body. We deployed deep convolutional neural network for automated detection of acute lymphoblastic leukemia and classification of its subtypes into 4 classes, that is, L1, L2, L3, and Normal which were mostly neglected in previous literature. In contrary to the training from scratch, we deployed pretrained AlexNet which was fine-tuned on our data set. Last layers of the pretrained network were replaced with new layers which can classify the input images into 4 classes. To reduce overtraining, data augmentation technique was used. We also compared the data sets with different color models to check the performance over different color images. For acute lymphoblastic leukemia detection, we achieved a sensitivity of 100%, specificity of 98.11%, and accuracy of 99.50%; and for acute lymphoblastic leukemia subtype classification the sensitivity was 96.74%, specificity was 99.03%, and accuracy was 96.06%. Unlike the standard methods, our proposed method was able to achieve high accuracy without any need of microscopic image segmentation.