Leukocyte subtype classification with multi-model fusion

Accurate classification of leukocytes is crucial for the diagnosis of hematologic malignancies, particularly leukemia. However, traditional leukocyte classification methods are time-consuming and subject to subjective interpretation by examiners. To address this issue, we aimed to develop a leukocyte classification system capable of accurately classifying 11 leukocyte classes, which would aid radiologists in diagnosing leukemia. Our proposed two-stage classification scheme involved a multi-model fusion based on ResNet for rough leukocyte classification, which focused on shape features, followed by fine-grained leukocyte classification using support vector machine for lymphocytes based on texture features. Our dataset consisted of 11,102 microscopic leukocyte images of 11 classes. Our proposed method achieved accurate leukocyte subtype classification with high levels of accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and precision of 97.03 ± 0.05, 96.76 ± 0.05, 99.65 ± 0.05, and 96.54 ± 0.05, respectively, in the test set. The experimental results demonstrate that the leukocyte classification model based on multi-model fusion can effectively classify 11 leukocyte classes, providing valuable technical support for enhancing the performance of hematology analyzers. Graphical abstract