Hybrid Inception v3 XGBoost Model for Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia Classification

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is the most common type of pediatric malignancy which accounts for 25% of all pediatric cancers. It is a life-threatening disease which if left untreated can cause death within a few weeks. Many computerized methods have been proposed for the detection of ALL from microscopic cell images. In this paper, we propose a hybrid Inception v3 XGBoost model for the classification of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) from microscopic white blood cell images. In the proposed model, Inception v3 acts as the image feature extractor and the XGBoost model acts as the classification head. Experiments indicate that the proposed model performs better than the other methods identified in literature. The proposed hybrid model achieves a weighted F1 score of 0.986. Through experiments, we demonstrate that using an XGBoost classification head instead of a softmax classification head improves classification performance for this dataset for several different CNN backbones (feature extractors). We also visualize the attention map of the features extracted by Inception v3 to interpret the features learnt by the proposed model.