ConcatNeXt: An automated blood cell classification with a new deep convolutional neural network

Abstract

Examining peripheral blood smears is valuable in clinical settings, yet manual identification of blood cells proves time-consuming. To address this, an automated blood cell image classification system is crucial. Our objective is to develop a precise automated model for detecting various blood cell types, leveraging a novel deep learning architecture. We harnessed a publicly available dataset of 17,092 blood cell images categorized into eight classes. Our innovation lies in ConcatNeXt, a new convolutional neural network. In the spirit of Geoffrey Hinton's approach, we adapted ConvNeXt by substituting the Gaussian error linear unit with a rectified linear unit and layer normalization with batch normalization. We introduced depth concatenation blocks to fuse information effectively and incorporated a patchify layer. Integrating ConcatNeXt with nested patch-based deep feature engineering, featuring downstream iterative neighborhood component analysis and support vector machine-based functions, establishes a comprehensive approach. ConcatNeXt achieved notable validation and test accuracies of 97.43% and 97.77%, respectively. The ConcatNeXt-based feature engineering model further elevated accuracy to 98.73%. Gradient-weighted class activation maps were employed to provide interpretability, offering valuable insights into model decision-making. Our proposed ConcatNeXt and nested patch-based deep feature engineering models excel in blood cell image classification, showcasing remarkable classification performances. These innovations mark significant strides in computer vision-based blood cell analysis. © The Author(s) 2024.