CAB‐Net: Convolutional attention BLSTM network for enhanced leukocyte classification

In recent years, deep learning techniques have been increasingly utilized to automate and reduce human errors in leukocyte classification. However, reliability and accuracy issues remain a challenge. This paper proposes CAB‐Net, an end‐to‐end deep learning‐based model that integrates a convolutional neural network with an attention mechanism and BLSTM. The model uses a stack of convolutional and pooling layers to extract initial features from input images, which are then fed into the attention block to generate class‐specific discriminative features and BLSTM employed to model deterministic class correlations between highlighted discriminative features and labels. Experimental results show that CAB‐Net outperforms state‐of‐the‐art methods in term of accuracy, precision, recall, F1‐Score, and AUC‐ROC. In addition, the CAB‐Net model demonstrates good performance even with low‐resolution images. Consequently, CAB‐Net can be considered as the current state‐of‐the‐art prediction model for improving leukocyte classification in clinical environments.