Accurate morphological classification of white blood cells (WBCs) is an important step in the diagnosis of leukemia, a disease in which nonfunctional blast cells accumulate in the bone marrow. Recently, deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been successfully used to classify leukocytes by training them on single-cell images from a specific domain. Most CNN models assume that the distributions of the training and test data are similar, i.e., that the data are independently and identically distributed. Therefore, they are not robust to different staining protocols, magnifications, resolutions, scanners, or imaging protocols, as well as variations in clinical centers or patient cohorts. In addition, domain-specific data imbalances affect the generalization performance of classifiers. Here, we train a robust CNN for WBC classification by addressing cross-domain data imbalance and domain shifts. To this end, we use two loss functions and demonstrate the effectiveness on out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. Our approach achieves the best F1 macro score compared to other existing methods, and is able to consider rare cell types. This is the first demonstration of imbalanced domain generalization in hematological cytomorphology and paves the way for robust single cell classification methods for the application in laboratories and clinics.

本文介绍了一种针对不同细胞域之间数据分布不平衡和因噪声、神经元元素变化等因素引起的域移动问题的深度卷积神经网络。该方法在精确识别细胞分类方面表现出色，为实验室和诊所的应用提供了坚实的基础。

血液形态学中鲜明细胞分类的失衡域泛化