Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is a life-threatening hematological malignancy that requires early and accurate diagnosis for effective treatment. However, the manual diagnosis of ALL is time-consuming and can delay critical treatment decisions. To address this challenge, researchers have turned to advanced technologies such as deep learning (DL) models. These models leverage the power of artificial intelligence to analyze complex patterns and features in medical images and data, enabling faster and more accurate diagnosis of ALL. However, the existing DL-based ALL diagnosis suffers from various challenges, such as computational complexity, sensitivity to hyperparameters, and difficulties with noisy or low-quality input images. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a novel Deep Skip Connections-Based Dense Network (DSCNet) tailored for ALL diagnosis using peripheral blood smear images. The DSCNet architecture integrates skip connections, custom image filtering, Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence loss, and dropout regularization to enhance its performance and generalization abilities. DSCNet leverages skip connections to address the vanishing gradient problem and capture long-range dependencies, while custom image filtering enhances relevant features in the input data. KL divergence loss serves as the optimization objective, enabling accurate predictions. Dropout regularization is employed to prevent overfitting during training, promoting robust feature representations. The experiments conducted on an augmented dataset for ALL highlight the effectiveness of DSCNet. The proposed DSCNet outperforms competing methods, showcasing significant enhancements in accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, F-score, and area under the curve (AUC), achieving increases of 1.25%, 1.32%, 1.12%, 1.24%, and 1.23%, respectively. The proposed approach demonstrates the potential of DSCNet as an effective tool for early and accurate ALL diagnosis, with potential applications in clinical settings to improve patient outcomes and advance leukemia detection research.
Keywords: KL divergence loss; acute lymphoblastic leukemia; data augmentation; deep learning; dense network; diagnosis, medical imaging; dropout regularization; peripheral blood smear images; skip connections.