Advancing blood cell detection and classification: performance evaluation of modern deep learning models

The detection and classification of blood cells are important in diagnosing and monitoring a variety of blood-related illnesses, such as anemia, leukemia, and infection, all of which may cause significant mortality. Accurate blood cell identification has a high clinical relevance in these patients because this would help to prevent false-negative diagnosis and to treat them in a timely and effective manner, thus reducing their clinical impacts.Our research aims to automate the process and eliminate manual efforts in blood cell counting. While our primary focus is on detection and classification, the output generated by our approach can be useful for disease prediction. This follows a two-step approach, where YOLO-based detection is first performed to locate blood cells, followed by classification using a hybrid CNN model to ensure accurate identification. We conducted a thorough and extensive comparison with other state-of-the-art models, including MobileNetV2, ShuffleNetV2, and DarkNet, for blood cell detection and classification. In terms of real-time performance, YOLOv10 outperforms other object detection models with better detection rates and classification accuracy. But MobileNetV2 and ShuffleNetV2 are more computationally efficient, which becomes more appropriate for resource-constrained environments. In contrast, DarkNet outperformed in terms of feature extraction performance, and the fine blood cell type classification. Additionally, an annotated blood cell data set was generated for this study. A diverse set of blood cell images with fine-grained annotations is contained in this dataset to make it useful for deep learning models training and evaluation. Because the present dataset will be an important resource for researchers and developers working on automatic blood cell detection and classification systems, we will make it publicly available under the open-access nature in order to accelerate the collaboration and progress in this field.