Biomedical Diagnosis of Leukemia Using a Deep Learner Classifier

Leukemia cancer is the most common type of cancer that occurs in childhood. The most common types are acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL) and acute myelogenous leukemia (AML) which affect children and adults, respectively. Several health issues occur due to these cancers. Leukemia affects the bone marrow or the lymph nodes. Leukemia produces abnormal white blood cells via the bone marrow system. The affected white blood cells are unable to perform their tasks properly. Detecting leukemia usually requires taking a blood smear from a patient and working with expert hematologists who analyze the smear with a microscope. In this paper, a method to detect ALL and AML using a deep learner classifier is developed and proposed. The method detects both types, determines their severity, and creates a message that recommends next steps to patients. This approach works based on image segmentation and a convolutional neural network (CNN) tool called AlexNet. The obtained results from the proposed approach and using MATLAB reached more than 98% accuracy. The margin exists because several operations are needed to fully detect the blood cancer. A dataset of leukemia from the Kaggle site is used to test the developed method and illustrate its effectiveness. This dataset is C-NMC_Leukemia, and it consists of nearly 10 GB worth of 15,000 images. A confusion matrix of testing images is provided to prove the correctness of the presented approach. Furthermore, a comparative analysis between the proposed algorithm and some works from the literature is presented. This analysis compares the method used to extract features, the classifier that is utilized, the accuracy, the precision, and the recall. The obtained results indicate that the proposed method outperforms other works and produces better results.