Diagnosing Leukemia in Blood Smear Images Using an Ensemble of Classifiers and Pre-Trained Convolutional Neural Networks

Leukemia is a worldwide disease. In this paper we demonstrate that it is possible to build an automated, efficient and rapid leukemia diagnosis system. We demonstrate that it is possible to improve the precision of current techniques from the literature using the description power of well-known Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). We extract features from a blood smear image using pre-trained CNNs in order to obtain an unique image description. Many feature selection techniques were evaluated and we chose PCA to select the features that are in the final descriptor. To classify the images on healthy and pathological we created an ensemble of classifiers with three individual classification algorithms (Support Vector Machine, Multilayer Perceptron and Random Forest). In the tests we obtained an accuracy rate of 100%. Besides the high accuracy rate, the tests showed that our approach requires less processing time than the methods analyzed in this paper, considering the fact that our approach does not use segmentation to obtain specific cell regions from the blood smear image.