Study on Fine-Grained Visual Classification of Low-Resolution Urinary Erythrocyte

The morphological analysis test item of urine red blood cells is referred to as “extracorporeal renal biopsy,” which holds significant importance for medical department testing. However, the accuracy of existing urine red blood cell morphology analyzers is suboptimal, and they are not widely utilized in medical examinations. Challenges include low image spatial resolution, blurred distinguishing features between cells, difficulty in fine-grained feature extraction, and insufficient data volume. This article aims to improve the classification accuracy of low-resolution urine red blood cells. This paper proposes a super-resolution method based on category-aware loss and an RBC-MIX data enhancement approach. It optimizes the cross-entropy loss to maximize the classification boundary and improve intra-class tightness and inter-class difference, achieving fine-grained classification of low-resolution urine red blood cells. Experimental outcomes demonstrate that with this method, an accuracy rate of 97.8% can be achieved for low-resolution urine red blood cell images. This algorithm attains outstanding classification performance for low-resolution urine red blood cells with only category labels required. This method can serve as a practical reference for urine red blood cell morphology examination items.

Graphical Abstract