Convolutional Neural Network and decision support in medical imaging: case study of the recognition of blood cell subtypes

Identifying and characterizing the patient's blood samples is indispensable in diagnostics of malignance suspicious. A painstaking and sometimes subjective task is used in laboratories to manually classify white blood cells. Neural mathematical methods as deep learnings can be very useful in the automated recognition of blood cells. This study uses a particular type of deep learning i.e., convolutional neural networks (CNNs or ConvNets) for image recognition of the four (4) blood cell types (neutrophil, eosinophil, lymphocyte and monocyte) and to enable it to tag them employing a dataset of blood cells with labels for the corresponding cell types. The elements of the database are the input of our CNN and they allowed us to create learning models for the image recognition/classification of the blood cells. We evaluated the recognition performance and outputs learned by the networks in order to implement a neural image recognition model capable of distinguishing polynuclear cells (neutrophil and eosinophil) from those of mononuclear cells (lymphocyte and monocyte). The validation accuracy is 97.77%.