A New Method for Diagnosis of Leukemia Utilizing a Hybrid DL-ML Approach for Binary and Multi-Class Classification on a Limited-Sized Database

Infection of leukemia in humans causes many complications in its later stages.It impairs bone marrow’s ability to produce blood.Morphological diagnosis of human blood cells is a well-known and well-proven technique for diagnosis in this case.The binary classification is employed to distinguish between normal and leukemiainfected cells.In addition,various subtypes of leukemia require different treatments.These sub-classes must also be detected to obtain an accurate diagnosis of the type of leukemia.This entails using multi-class classification to determine the leukemia subtype.This is usually done using a microscopic examination of these blood cells.Due to the requirement of a trained pathologist,the decision process is critical,which leads to the development of an automated software framework for diagnosis.Researchers utilized state-of-the-art machine learning approaches,such as Support Vector Machine(SVM),Random Forest(RF),Na飗e Bayes,K-Nearest Neighbor(KNN),and others,to provide limited accuracies of classification.More advanced deep-learning methods are also utilized.Due to constrained dataset sizes,these approaches result in over-fitting,reducing their outstanding performances.This study introduces a deep learning-machine learning combined approach for leukemia diagnosis.It uses deep transfer learning frameworks to extract and classify features using state-of-the-artmachine learning classifiers.The transfer learning frameworks such as VGGNet,Xception,InceptionResV2,Densenet,and ResNet are employed as feature extractors.The extracted features are given to RF and XGBoost classifiers for the binary and multi-class classification of leukemia cells.For the experimentation,a very popular ALL-IDB dataset is used,approaching a maximum accuracy of 100%.A private real images dataset with three subclasses of leukemia images,including Acute Myloid Leukemia(AML),Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia(CLL),and Chronic Myloid Leukemia(CML),is also employed to generalize the system.This dataset achieves an impressive multi-class classification accuracy of 97.08%.The proposed approach is robust and generalized by a standardized dataset and the real image dataset with a limited sample size(520 images).Hence,this method can be explored further for leukemia diagnosis having a limited number of dataset samples.