Classification of blood cancer images using a convolutional neural networks ensemble

This paper presents the method of our submission to the ISBI 2019 Challenge for the task of classification of normal versus malignant cells in B-ALL white blood cancer microscopic images. We aimed to combine convolutional neural networks with several state-of-the-art techniques. Specifically, we fine-tuned pretrained deep learning networks including ResNet and DenseNet for this task. Overfitting is one of the major problems for this challenge. We solve overfitting by using the gradient norm clipping and the cosine annealing learning rate schedule with restarts, which have a significant impact on the performance of our deep neural network. More importantly, adaptive pooling layer is used in our models. With this modification, models are able to adapt to images of any size. An ensemble of deep models achieved a 0.8570 weighted-f1 score on the preliminary test set reported by the test server.