Platelet detection and counting play a greatly significant role in medical field, especially in routine blood tests which can be used to judge blood status and diagnose related diseases. Therefore, platelet detection is valuable for diagnosing related blood diseases such as liver-related diseases. Blood analyzers and visual microscope counting were widely used for platelet detection, but the experimental procedure took nearly 20 minutes and can only be performed by a professional doctor. In recent years, technological breakthroughs in artificial intelligence have made it possible to detect red blood cells through deep learning methods. However, due to the inaccessibility of platelet datasets and the small size of platelets, deep learning-based platelet detection studies are almost nonexistent. In this paper, we carried out experiments for platelet detection based on commonly used object detection models, such as Single Shot Multibox Detector (SSD), RetinaNet, Faster_rcnn, and You Only Look Once_v3 (YOLO_v3). Compared with the other three models, YOLO_v3 can detect platelets more effectively. And we proposed three ideas for improvement based on YOLO_v3. Our study demonstrated that YOLO_v3 can be adopted for platelet detection accurately and in real time. We also implemented YOLO_v3 with multiscale fusion, YOLO_v3 with anchor box clustering, and YOLO_v3 with match parameter on our self-created dataset and, respectively, achieved 1.8% higher average precision (AP), 2.38% higher AP, and 2.05% higher AP than YOLO_v3. The comprehensive experiments revealed that YOLO_v3 with the improved ideas performs better in platelet detection than YOLO_v3.
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