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

Abstract

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%.