Automated Diagnosis of Leukemia: A Comprehensive Review

Leukemia is the rapid production of abnormal white blood cells that consequently affects the blood and damages the bone marrow. The overproduction of abnormal and immature white blood cells leads to the damage of the immune system due to the reduced production of red blood cells and platelets by the bone marrow of the body. This hematological malignancy is generally diagnosed by manual methods such as complete blood count (CBC), bone marrow aspiration, or microscopic examination of the blood smear. Nevertheless, the manual methods of leukemia diagnosis are economical but are found to be less reliable, time-consuming, and hectic. Technological advancement in the medical field has effectively addressed these issues in the past. The problems in the manual diagnosis of leukemia detection have been overcome by the development of automated methods using the computer-aided diagnostic (CAD) systems for efficient and reliable leukemia diagnosis. Since the last decade, multiple approaches have been proposed for the CAD systems regarding pre-processing, segmentation, feature extraction, feature selection, and for the improvement of the classification accuracy of the CAD system for the leukemia detection. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the CAD systems for the detection of the various types of leukemia. The review presented here entails the details of various CAD systems for the automated diagnosis of various types of leukemia and analyses their methodologies in terms of their efficiency in pre-processing, segmentation, feature extraction and selection, and overall classification accuracy of the CAD system.