An ensemble classifier system for early diagnosis of acute lymphoblastic leukemia in blood microscopic images

Leukemia is a malignant neoplasm of the blood or bone marrow that affects both children and adults and remains a leading cause of death around the world. Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is the most common type of leukemia and is more common among children and young adults. ALL diagnosis through microscopic examination of the peripheral blood and bone marrow tissue samples is performed by hematologists and has been an indispensable technique long since. However, such visual examinations of blood samples are often slow and are also limited by subjective interpretations and less accurate diagnosis. The objective of this work is to improve the ALL diagnostic accuracy by analyzing morphological and textural features from the blood image using image processing. This paper aims at proposing a quantitative microscopic approach toward the discrimination of lymphoblasts (malignant) from lymphocytes (normal) in stained blood smear and bone marrow samples and to assist in the development of a computer-aided screening of ALL. Automated recognition of lymphoblasts is accomplished using image segmentation, feature extraction, and classification over light microscopic images of stained blood films. Accurate and authentic diagnosis of ALL is obtained with the use of improved segmentation methodology, prominent features, and an ensemble classifier, facilitating rapid screening of patients. Experimental results are obtained and compared over the available image data set. It is observed that an ensemble of classifiers leads to 99 % accuracy in comparison with other standard classifiers, i.e., naive Bayesian (NB), K-nearest neighbor (KNN), multilayer perceptron (MLP), radial basis functional network (RBFN), and support vector machines (SVM).