Deep learning-based light scattering microfluidic cytometry for label-free acute lymphocytic leukemia classification

The subtyping of Acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL) is important for proper treatment strategies and prognosis. Conventional methods for manual blood and bone marrow testing are time-consuming and labor-intensive, while recent flow cytometric immunophenotyping has the limitations such as high cost. Here we develop the deep learning-based light scattering imaging flow cytometry for label-free classification of ALL. The single ALL cells confined in three dimensional (3D) hydrodynamically focused stream are excited by light sheet. Our label-free microfluidic cytometry obtains big-data two dimensional (2D) light scattering patterns from single ALL cells of B/T subtypes. A deep learning framework named Inception V3-SIFT (Scale invariant feature transform)-Scattering Net (ISSC-Net) is developed, which can perform high-precision classification of T-ALL and B-ALL cell line cells with an accuracy of 0.993 ± 0.003. Our deep learning-based 2D light scattering flow cytometry is promising for automatic and accurate subtyping of un-stained ALL.