Efficient diagnosis of hematologic malignancies using bone marrow microscopic images: A method based on MultiPathGAN and MobileViTv2

Hematologic malignancies, including the associated multiple subtypes, are critically threatening to human health. The timely detection of malignancies is crucial for their effective treatment. In this regard, the examination of bone marrow smears constitutes a crucial step. Nonetheless, the conventional approach to cell identification and enumeration is laborious and time-intensive. Therefore, the present study aimed to develop a method for the efficient diagnosis of these malignancies directly from bone marrow microscopic images.

A deep learning-based framework was developed to facilitate the diagnosis of common hematologic malignancies. First, a total of 2033 microscopic images of bone marrow analysis, including the images for 6 disease types and 1 healthy control, were collected from two Chinese medical websites. Next, the collected images were classified into the training, validation, and test datasets in the ratio of 7:1:2. Subsequently, a method of stain normalization to multi-domains (stain domain augmentation) based on the MultiPathGAN model was developed to equalize the stain styles and expand the image datasets. Afterward, a lightweight hybrid model named MobileViTv2, which integrates the strengths of both CNNs and ViTs, was developed for disease classification. The resulting model was trained and utilized to diagnose patients based on multiple microscopic images of their bone marrow smears, obtained from a cohort of 61 individuals.

MobileViTv2 exhibited an average accuracy of 94.28% when applied to the test set, with multiple myeloma, acute lymphocytic leukemia, and lymphoma revealed as the three diseases diagnosed with the highest accuracy values of 98%, 96%, and 96%, respectively. Regarding patient-level prediction, the average accuracy of MobileViTv2 was 96.72%. This model outperformed both CNN and ViT models in terms of accuracy, despite utilizing only 9.8 million parameters. When applied to two public datasets, MobileViTv2 exhibited accuracy values of 99.75% and 99.72%, respectively, and outperformed previous methods.

The proposed framework could be applied directly to bone marrow microscopic images with different stain styles to efficiently establish the diagnosis of common hematologic malignancies.