Quantifying imbalanced classification methods for leukemia detection

Uncontrolled proliferation of B-lymphoblast cells is a common characterization of Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL). B-lymphoblasts are found in large numbers in peripheral blood in malignant cases. Early detection of the cell in bone marrow is essential as the disease progresses rapidly if left untreated. However, automated classification of the cell is challenging, owing to its fine-grained variability with B-lymphoid precursor cells and imbalanced data points. Deep learning algorithms demonstrate potential for such fine-grained classification as well as suffer from the imbalanced class problem. In this paper, we explore different deep learning-based State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) approaches to tackle imbalanced classification problems. Our experiment includes input, GAN (Generative Adversarial Networks), and loss-based methods to mitigate the issue of imbalanced class on the challenging C-NMC and ALLIDB-2 dataset for leukemia detection. We have shown empirical evidence that loss-based methods outperform GAN-based and input-based methods in imbalanced classification scenarios. [Display omitted] •Performed extensive analysis on state-of-the-art imbalance classification techniques.•Loss based methods are more effective than input and GAN based methods.•MCC loss works best in high imbalance scenarios (i.e. 1:100 ratio).