White Blood Cells Detection using YOLOv3 with CNN Feature Extraction Models

There are several types of blood cancer. One of them is Leukaemia. This is due to leukocyte or white blood cell (WBCs) production problem in the bone marrow. Detection at earlier stage is important so that the patient is able to get a proper treatment. The conventional detection and blood count method is less efficient and it is done manually by pathologist. Thus, there will be a long line to wait for the results and also delay the treatment. A faster detection procedure and technique will have high impact on the real time diagnostic. Fortunately, these problems are able to overcome by making the blood test procedures automatic. One of the effort is the development of deep learning for WBCs detection and classification. In computer aided WBCs detection, the You Only Look Once (YOLO) based platform present a promising outcome. However, the investigation of optimal YOLO structure remains vague. This paper investigate the effect of the deep learning based WBCs detection using You Only Look Once version 3 (YOLOv3) with different pretrained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model. The models that been tested are the Alexnet, Visual Geometry Group 16 (VGG16), Darknet19 and the existing YOLOv3 feature extraction model, the Darknet53. The architecture consist of the bounding box for class prediction, feature extraction, and additional convolutional layers. It was trained with 242 WBCs images from Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) dataset. The final outcome shows that the YOLOv3 architecture with Alexnet as its feature extractor produced the highest mean average precision of 98% and have better performance than the other models.