Blood Cell Classification Using Deep Learning

Welcome to our Blood Cell Classification project! Do you wish to learn how the machines get to distinguish between the various types of blood cells? In this project, we immerse ourselves in an AI-based approach that does just that: using some of the most potent machine-learning tools to interpret sophisticated cell images. It has brought the prospect of quicker, more accurate diagnosis a little bit closer.

Overview

In this project, we build deep learning models to be able to categorize blood cells from image data. There are several blood cells which include red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets and each has its function in our body. Identifying these cells may not be easy and that’s where deep learning for image classification comes into the picture. Through training the model on different types of cell images we train it to correctly recognize each cell type.

In this project, we will discuss Data Pre-Processing, Selection of a Model, Training the Model, and assessing the performance. It will also demonstrate how it is possible to generalize it to real medical analysis where precision is necessary. So at the end of the project, one will understand how to employ machine learning to make blood cell analysis smarter, faster, and efficient.

Prerequisites

Before we jump into the code, here’s what you’ll need:

An understanding of Python programming and usage of Google Colab
Basic knowledge about deep learning and medical images.
Comfortable using frameworks like Tensorflow, Keras, Numpy, OpenCV, and Seaborn to handle data and build models and visualize data and performance of models
Blood cell dataset.

Once you organize these tools, you will notice how almost all of them can be used in the following step. Also, do not stress if you are not a Python master—through the tutorial, you will understand every line of the code!

Approach

In this Blood Cell Classification project, first, we collected the dataset from Kaggle. Then we load a labeled dataset of blood cell images, each tagged with its respective cell type. After exploring the dataset, we preprocess the images by using resizing, normalization, and augmentation techniques to improve model performance. Then we build three different deep-learning models to classify the blood cells from images.

After training the model, we evaluate the model performance using different techniques like precision, recall, and confusion matrix to ensure that models work perfectly on unseen data

Finally, we test the model on new images to confirm its ability to classify unseen samples accurately, showcasing the model’s real-world potential in medical diagnostics.

Workflow and Methodology

This project can be divided into the following basic steps:

Data Collection: We collected the blood cell dataset labeled with different cell types from Kaggle.
Data preprocess: To improve the model performance and achieve higher accuracy, we applied different preprocessing techniques. First, we augmented the dataset to create a balanced dataset. Then we resized and normalized the images in 0 to 1 pixel values.
Model Selection: In this project, there are three models used (Custom CNN, EfficientNetB4, and VGG16).
Training and Testing: Each of the Models has been trained on the preprocessed dataset and later, tested on the dataset that was not used during training.
Model Evaluation: The evaluation of the model's performance is done by evaluating accuracy, precision, recall, confusion matrix, etc.
Prediction and Testing: Test the models on new images to confirm their effectiveness in classifying unseen samples accurately.

The methodology includes

Data Preprocessing: The images are resized, normalized, and augmented to improve the performance of models based on them.
Model Training: Each model is trained with 100 epochs to enhance the level of performance.
Evaluation: Standard metrics (accuracy, working of confusion matrix) are applied to assess the efficiency of the models.

Dataset Collection

The project sourced a dataset from Kaggle. This is a popular repository of various datasets for machine learning projects. This dataset consists of images of blood cells. In this dataset, each image is labeled with a specific blood cell type. Each image is tagged with the respective cell type, which is quite critical in supervised learning. This assists our model in learning the individual characteristics of each cell type, which is essential for accurate classification as a result.

Data Preparation

The dataset was pre-processed by resizing the images to a size of 128 * 128 pixels and scaling the pixels to the range 0 to 255. To increase the variability of the dataset, primarily data augmentation techniques were applied.

Data Preparation Workflow

Load Dataset from Google Drive
Rotation, flipping, and changes in contrast, among others, are employed to increase the diversity of the datasets.
Process and Resize as per Standards used in the model. This helps to standardize the input of the models.
Further, the collected dataset has to be split into training and validation sets.

Code Explanation

STEP 1:

Mounting Google Drive

This command mounts your Google Drive to the indicated folder path (/content/drive). After this step has been performed, you will need to allow access to your Google Drive account. After the access has been granted, reading and writing files will become straightforward as you can do this straight from your Drive, which is very helpful in loading datasets and saving the results of the models during the project.

from google.colab import drive
drive.mount('/content/drive')

Import the necessary libraries.

This code block imports all the required libraries for this project for creating, training, and evaluating models. It also imports image processing libraries like PIL and OpenCV for handling images, and matplotlib and seaborn for data visualization. Scikit-learn utilities facilitate model evaluation using metrics such as confusion matrices.

import os
import keras
import numpy as np
from tqdm import tqdm
from keras.models import Sequential
from keras.callbacks import ModelCheckpoint
from keras.layers import Convolution2D, MaxPooling2D, ZeroPadding2D
from keras import optimizers
from keras.preprocessing import image
from PIL import Image,ImageOps
import cv2
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns
from sklearn.metrics import confusion_matrix, classification_report
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import tensorflow
from tensorflow.keras import Model
from tensorflow.keras.layers import Input, BatchNormalization, ReLU, ELU, Dropout, Conv2D, Dense, MaxPool2D, AvgPool2D, GlobalAvgPool2D, Concatenate
import tensorflow as tf
import tensorflow.keras
from tensorflow.keras import models, layers
from tensorflow.keras.models import Model, model_from_json, Sequential
from tensorflow.keras.preprocessing.image import ImageDataGenerator, array_to_img, img_to_array, load_img
from tensorflow.keras.callbacks import TensorBoard
from tensorflow.keras.layers import Dense, Dropout, Activation, Flatten, Conv2D, MaxPooling2D, SeparableConv2D, UpSampling2D, BatchNormalization, Input, GlobalAveragePooling2D
from tensorflow.keras.regularizers import l2
from tensorflow.keras.optimizers import SGD, RMSprop
from tensorflow.keras.utils import to_categorical

STEP 2:

Data collection and preparation

Load Dataset

This section of code is mainly focused on arranging the paths of the dataset. It starts by guiding the program to the main folder containing the blood-cell Datasets located on Google Drive. After that, it defines two different paths. One for the training set and another for the validation set.

dataset='/content/drive/MyDrive/Blood_Cell_Datasets'
train_folder = os.path.join(dataset,"training")
test_folder = os.path.join(dataset,"validation")

Listing categories

The code sets the size of the images, creates a list to hold the names of different classes, checks which classes are available in the training folder, and then prints those class names. This makes it easier to keep track of and understand the different types of images that will be used for training the model.

img_size = 128
categories = []
for i in os.listdir(train_folder):
    categories.append(i)
print(categories)

STEP 3:

Data processing

This function iterates over different folders containing categories of images. Where it also performs reading and resizing images. It keeps the count of images across all categories and stores the processed images alongside their corresponding class numbers in a list. This takes care of the image preparation needed for training a model afterward.

# Function to process data
def process_data(folder, categories, img_size):
    data = []
    class_counts = {category: 0 for category in categories}
    for c in categories:
        path = os.path.join(folder, c)
        class_num = categories.index(c)
        for img in tqdm(os.listdir(path), desc=f"Processing {c}"):
            try:
                img_array = cv2.imread(os.path.join(path, img))
                img_resized = cv2.resize(img_array, (img_size, img_size))
                data.append([img_resized, class_num])
                class_counts[c] += 1
            except Exception as e:
                pass
        print(f"Class '{c}' has {class_counts[c]} images")
    return data, class_counts

Processing Training Data

This code calls the process_data function. This function processes all the images in the training folder, resizes them, labels them by category, and then prints the total number of training images processed.

training_data, train_class_counts = process_data(train_folder, categories, img_size)
print(f"Total training data: {len(training_data)}")

Plotting Training Class Distributions

This code creates a visual bar chart that displays the count of images in each class for the training data. It helps in visualizing the distribution of data across different categories. This highlights whether it is balanced or skewed.

plt.figure(figsize=(10, 6))
plt.bar(train_class_counts.keys(), train_class_counts.values())
plt.xlabel('Categories')
plt.ylabel('Number of Images')
plt.title('Class Distribution (Training Data)')
plt.xticks(rotation=90, ha='right')
# Add labels to the bars
colors = plt.cm.get_cmap('viridis', len(train_class_counts))
for i, bar in enumerate(plt.gca().patches):
    bar.set_color(colors(i))
plt.tight_layout()
plt.show()

Processing Validation Data

This code calls the process_data function. This function processes all the images in the validation folder, resizes them, labels them by category, and then prints the total number of validation images processed.

validation_data, val_class_counts = process_data(test_folder, categories, img_size)
print(f"Total validation data: {len(validation_data)}")

Plotting Training Class Distributions

This code creates a visual bar chart that displays the count of images in each class for the validation data.

plt.figure(figsize=(10, 6))
plt.bar(val_class_counts.keys(), val_class_counts.values())
plt.xlabel('Categories')
plt.ylabel('Number of Images')
plt.title('Class Distribution (Validation Data)')
plt.xticks(rotation=90, ha='right')
# Add labels to the bars
colors = plt.cm.get_cmap('viridis', len(val_class_counts))
for i, bar in enumerate(plt.gca().patches):
    bar.set_color(colors(i))
plt.tight_layout()
plt.show()

Preparing Data for Model

This code’s task is to arrange and ready images (X_train) and labels (Y_train) for conducting the training process. It reshapes the images in the required form of 128 x 128 pixels and 3 color channels and creates NumPy arrays ready to be fed to a neural network.

X_train = []
Y_train = []
for img, label in training_data:
    X_train.append(img)
    Y_train.append(label)
X_train = np.array(X_train).astype('float32').reshape(-1, img_size, img_size, 3)
Y_train = np.array(Y_train)
print(f"X_train= {X_train.shape} Y_train= {Y_train.shape}")

This code’s task is to arrange and ready images (X_test) and labels (Y_test) for conducting the validation process. It reshapes the images in the required form of 128 x 128 pixels and 3 color channels and creates NumPy arrays ready to be fed to a neural network.

X_test = []
Y_test = []
for features,label in validation_data:
    X_test.append(features)
    Y_test.append(label)
X_test = np.array(X_test).astype('float32').reshape(-1, img_size, img_size, 3)
Y_test = np.array(Y_test)
print(f"X_test= {X_test.shape} Y_test= {Y_test.shape}")
X_train, X_test = X_train / 255.0, X_test / 255.0

STEP 4:

Visualization

This code randomly selects three images from every category in the training dataset and arranges them in a grid. Each image features its category name as the title. It makes an easy visualization of a sample from each class.