NBCDC-YOLOv8: A new framework to improve blood cell detection and classification based on YOLOv8

In recent years, computer technology has successfully permeated all areas of medicine and its management, and it now offers doctors an accurate and rapid means of diagnosis. Existing blood cell detection methods suffer from low accuracy, which is caused by the uneven distribution, high density, and mutual occlusion of different blood cell types in blood microscope images, this article introduces NBCDC-YOLOv8: a new framework to improve blood cell detection and classification based on YOLOv8. Our framework innovates on several fronts: it uses Mosaic data augmentation to enrich the dataset and add small targets, incorporates a space to depth convolution (SPD-Conv) tailored for cells that are small and have low resolution, and introduces the Multi-Separated and Enhancement Attention Module (MultiSEAM) to enhance feature map resolution. Additionally, it integrates a bidirectional feature pyramid network (BiFPN) for effective multi-scale feature fusion and includes four detection heads to improve recognition accuracy of various cell sizes, especially small target platelets. Evaluated on the Blood Cell Classification Dataset (BCCD), NBCDC-YOLOv8 obtains a mean average precision (mAP) of 94.7%, and thus surpasses the original YOLOv8n by 2.3%.