The detection and classification of acute myeloid leukaemia blood cell images based on different YOLO approaches

Medical image examination with a deep learning approach is greatly beneficial in the healthcare industry for faster diagnosis and disease monitoring. One of the popular deep learning algorithms such as you only look once (YOLO) developed for object detection is a successful state-ofthe-art algorithm in real-time object detection systems. Although YOLO is continuously improving in the object detection area, there are still questions about how different YOLO versions compare in terms of performance. We utilize eight YOLO versions to classify acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) blood cells in image examinations. We also acquired the publicly available AML dataset from the cancer imaging archive (TCIA) which consists of expert-labeled single cell images. Data augmentation techniques are additionally applied to enhance and balance the training images in the dataset. The overall results indicated that eight types of YOLO approaches have outstanding performances of more than 90% in precision and sensitivity. In comparison, YOLOv4-tiny has a more reliable performance than the other seven approaches. Consistently, the YOLOv4-tiny also achieved the highest AUC score. Therefore, this work can potentially provide a beneficial digital rapid tool in the screening and evaluation of numerous haematological disorders.