Examining peripheral blood smears is valuable in clinical settings, yet manual identification of blood cells proves time-consuming. To address this, an automated blood cell image classification system is crucial. Our objective is to develop a precise automated model for detecting various blood cell types, leveraging a novel deep learning architecture. We harnessed a publicly available dataset of 17,092 blood cell images categorized into eight classes. Our innovation lies in ConcatNeXt, a new convolutional neural network. In the spirit of Geoffrey Hinton's approach, we adapted ConvNeXt by substituting the Gaussian error linear unit with a rectified linear unit and layer normalization with batch normalization. We introduced depth concatenation blocks to fuse information effectively and incorporated a patchify layer. Integrating ConcatNeXt with nested patch-based deep feature engineering, featuring downstream iterative neighborhood component analysis and support vector machine-based functions, establishes a comprehensive approach. ConcatNeXt achieved notable validation and test accuracies of 97.43% and 97.77%, respectively. The ConcatNeXt-based feature engineering model further elevated accuracy to 98.73%. Gradient-weighted class activation maps were employed to provide interpretability, offering valuable insights into model decision-making. Our proposed ConcatNeXt and nested patch-based deep feature engineering models excel in blood cell image classification, showcasing remarkable classification performances. These innovations mark significant strides in computer vision-based blood cell analysis.

Automated urine sediment analysis has become an essential part of diagnosing, monitoring, and treating various diseases that affect the urinary tract and kidneys. However, manual analysis of urine sediment is time-consuming and prone to human bias, and hence there is a need for an automated urine sediment analysis systems using machine learning algorithms. In this work, we propose Swin-LBP, a handcrafted urine sediment classification model using the Swin transformer architecture and local binary pattern (LBP) technique to achieve high classification performance. The Swin-LBP model comprises five phases: preprocessing of input images using shifted windows-based patch division, six-layered LBP-based feature extraction, neighborhood component analysis-based feature selection, support vector machine-based calculation of six predicted vectors, and mode function-based majority voting of the six predicted vectors to generate four additional voted vectors. Our newly reconstructed urine sediment image dataset, consisting of 7 distinct classes, was utilized for training and testing our model. Our proposed model has several advantages over existing automated urinalysis systems. Firstly, we used a feature engineering model that enables high classification performance with linear complexity. This means that it can provide accurate results quickly and efficiently, making it an attractive alternative to time-consuming and biased manual urine sediment analysis. Additionally, our model outperformed existing deep learning models developed on the same source urine sediment image dataset, indicating its superiority in urine sediment classification. Our model achieved 92.60% accuracy for 7-class urine sediment classification, with an average precision of 92.05%. These results demonstrate that the proposed Swin-LBP model can provide a reliable and efficient solution for the diagnosis, surveillance, and therapeutic monitoring of various diseases affecting the kidneys and urinary tract. The proposed model's accuracy, speed, and efficiency make it an attractive option for clinical laboratories and healthcare facilities. In conclusion, the Swin-LBP model has the potential to revolutionize urine sediment analysis and improve patient outcomes in the diagnosis and treatment of urinary tract and kidney diseases.