Leukovit: An efficient vision transformer-based model for automatic classification of leukocytes

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Bioelectric Department, Faculty of Biomedical Engineering, Sahand University of Technology, Tabriz, Iran

Abstract

The identification and evaluation of leukocytes are important to assess the quality of the human immune system; however, the analysis of blood smears depends on the pathologist’s expertise. The manual method for analyzing and classifying WBCs is costly and time-consuming and can result in errors in detection. Most deep learning methods use CNN-based models for white blood cell classification. This paper discusses the use of a ViT-based network, for the classification of leukocytes (WBCs) in a blood sample. The Dataset used in this paper consists of 352 images with a size of 320x240, which was augmented through techniques to create a balanced dataset of 12444 images. The augmented data was then used to train a ViT-based architecture to classify the different types of WBCs. As the first step of the proposed algorithm, a convolutional tokenizer has been applied for patch extraction of images. These patches have been flattened and have been used as input for a ViT-based structure to recognize the subclasses in the second step. The results obtained using Leukovit show that the accuracy of the proposed network is 99.04% which is outperforming the state-of-the-art networks.

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TABRIZ JOURNAL OF ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING

Articles in Press, Corrected Proof
Available Online from 04 February 2024

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