Blood cells carry important information that can be used to represent a person's current state of health. The identification of different types of blood cells in a timely and precise manner is essential to cutting the infection risks that people face on a daily basis. The BCNet is an artificial intelligence (AI)-based deep learning (DL) framework that was proposed based on the capability of transfer learning with a convolutional neural network to rapidly and automatically identify the blood cells in an eight-class identification scenario: Basophil, Eosinophil, Erythroblast, Immature Granulocytes, Lymphocyte, Monocyte, Neutrophil, and Platelet. For the purpose of establishing the dependability and viability of BCNet, exhaustive experiments consisting of five-fold cross-validation tests are carried out. Using the transfer learning strategy, we conducted in-depth comprehensive experiments on the proposed BCNet's architecture and test it with three optimizers of ADAM, RMSprop (RMSP), and stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Meanwhile, the performance of the proposed BCNet is directly compared using the same dataset with the state-of-the-art deep learning models of DensNet, ResNet, Inception, and MobileNet. When employing the different optimizers, the BCNet framework demonstrated better classification performance with ADAM and RMSP optimizers. The best evaluation performance was achieved using the RMSP optimizer in terms of 98.51% accuracy and 96.24% F1-score. Compared with the baseline model, the BCNet clearly improved the prediction accuracy performance 1.94%, 3.33%, and 1.65% using the optimizers of ADAM, RMSP, and SGD, respectively. The proposed BCNet model outperformed the AI models of DenseNet, ResNet, Inception, and MobileNet in terms of the testing time of a single blood cell image by 10.98, 4.26, 2.03, and 0.21 msec. In comparison to the most recent deep learning models, the BCNet model could be able to generate encouraging outcomes. It is essential for the advancement of healthcare facilities to have such a recognition rate improving the detection performance of the blood cells.
Keywords: blood cell; deep transfer learning; multi-class identification; new BCNet framework; verification and validation.