Classification of red blood cell shapes in flow using outlier tolerant machine learning

The manual evaluation, classification and counting of biological objects demands for an enormous expenditure of time and subjective human input may be a source of error. Investigating the shape of red blood cells (RBCs) in microcapillary Poiseuille flow, we overcome this drawback by introducing a convolutional neural regression network for an automatic, outlier tolerant shape classification. From our experiments we expect two stable geometries: the so-called `slipper' and `croissant' shapes depending on the prevailing flow conditions and the cell-intrinsic parameters. Whereas croissants mostly occur at low shear rates, slippers evolve at higher flow velocities. With our method, we are able to find the transition point between both `phases' of stable shapes which is of high interest to ensuing theoretical studies and numerical simulations. Using statistically based thresholds, from our data, we obtain so-called phase diagrams which are compared to manual evaluations. Prospectively, our concept allows us to perform objective analyses of measurements for a variety of flow conditions and to receive comparable results. Moreover, the proposed procedure enables unbiased studies on the influence of drugs on flow properties of single RBCs and the resulting macroscopic change of the flow behavior of whole blood.Comment: 15 pages, published in PLoS Comput Biol, open acces

A Weakly Supervised Deep Learning Approach for Detecting Malaria and Sickle Cells in Blood Films

Machine vision analysis of blood films imaged under a brightfield microscope could provide scalable malaria diagnosis solutions in resource constrained endemic urban settings. The major bottleneck in successfully analyzing blood films with deep learning vision techniques is a lack of object-level annotations of disease markers such as parasites or abnormal red blood cells. To overcome this challenge, this work proposes a novel deep learning supervised approach that leverages weak labels readily available from routine clinical microscopy to diagnose malaria in thick blood film microscopy. This approach is based on aggregating the convolutional features of multiple objects present in one hundred high resolution image fields. We show that this method not only achieves expert-level malaria diagnostic accuracy without any hard object-level labels but can also identify individual malaria parasites in digitized thick blood films, which is useful in assessing disease severity and response to treatment. We demonstrate another application scenario where our approach is able to detect sickle cells in thin blood films. We discuss the wider applicability of the approach in automated analysis of thick blood films for the diagnosis of other blood disorders

DETECTION AND CLASSIFICATION OF RED BLOOD CELLS ABNORMALITY USING FASTER R-CNN AND GRAPH CONVOLUTIONAL NETWORKS

Research in medical imagery field such as analysis of Red Blood Cells (RBCs) abnormalities can be used to assist laboratory’s in determining further medical actions. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) is a commonly used method for the classification of RBCs abnormalities in blood cells images. However, CNN requires large number of labeled training data. A classification of RBCs abnormalities in limited data is a challenge. In this research we explore a semi-supervised learning using Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) to classify RBCs abnormalities with limited number of labeled sample images. The proposed method consists of 3 stages, i.e., extraction of Region of Interest (ROI) of RBCs from blood images using Faster R-CNN, abnormality labeling and abnormality classification using GCN. The experiment was conducted on a publicly accessible blood sample image dataset to compare classification performance of pretrained CNN models (Resnet-101 and VGG-16) and GCN models (Resnet-101 + GCN and VGG-16 + GCN). The experiment showed that the GCN model build on VGG-16 features (VGG-16  + GCN) produced the best accuracy of 95%

Red Blood Cell Segmentation with Overlapping Cell Separation and Classification on Imbalanced Dataset

Automated red blood cell (RBC) classification on blood smear images helps hematologists to analyze RBC lab results in a reduced time and cost. However, overlapping cells can cause incorrect predicted results, and so they have to be separated into multiple single RBCs before classifying. To classify multiple classes with deep learning, imbalance problems are common in medical imaging because normal samples are always higher than rare disease samples. This paper presents a new method to segment and classify RBCs from blood smear images, specifically to tackle cell overlapping and data imbalance problems. Focusing on overlapping cell separation, our segmentation process first estimates ellipses to represent RBCs. The method detects the concave points and then finds the ellipses using directed ellipse fitting. The accuracy from 20 blood smear images was 0.889. Classification requires balanced training datasets. However, some RBC types are rare. The imbalance ratio of this dataset was 34.538 for 12 RBC classes from 20,875 individual RBC samples. The use of machine learning for RBC classification with an imbalanced dataset is hence more challenging than many other applications. We analyzed techniques to deal with this problem. The best accuracy and F1-score were 0.921 and 0.8679, respectively, using EfficientNet-B1 with augmentation. Experimental results showed that the weight balancing technique with augmentation had the potential to deal with imbalance problems by improving the F1-score on minority classes, while data augmentation significantly improved the overall classification performance.Comment: This work has been submitted to the Heliyon for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessibl

Identification of Sickle Cell Anemia Using Deep Neural Networks

A molecule called hemoglobin is found in red blood cells that holds oxygen all over the body. Hemoglobin is elastic, round, and stable in a healthy human. This makes it possible to float across red blood cells. But the composition of hemoglobin is unhealthy if you have sickle cell disease. It refers to compact and bent red blood cells. The odd cells obstruct the flow of blood. It is dangerous and can result in severe discomfort, organ damage, heart strokes, and other symptoms. The human life expectancy can be shortened as well. The early identification of sickle calls will help people recognize signs that can assist antibiotics, supplements, blood transfusion, pain-relieving medications, and treatments etc. The manual assessment, diagnosis, and cell count are time consuming process and may result in misclassification and count since millions of red blood cells are in one spell. When utilizing data mining techniques such as the multilayer perceptron classifier algorithm, sickle cells can be effectively detected with high precision in the human body. The proposed approach tackles the limitations of manual research by implementing a powerful and efficient MLP (Multi-Layer Perceptron) classification algorithm that distinguishes Sickle Cell Anemia (SCA) into three classes: Normal (N), Sickle Cells(S) and Thalassemia (T) in red blood cells. This paper also presents the precision degree of the MLP classifier algorithm with other popular mining and machine learning algorithms on the dataset obtained from the Thalassemia and Sickle Cell Society (TSCS) located in Rajendra Nagar, Hyderabad, Telangana, India. Doi: 10.28991/esj-2021-01270 Full Text: PD