Background: Blood diseases such as leukemia, anemia, lymphoma, and thalassemia are hematological disorders that relate to abnormalities in the morphology and concentration of blood elements, specifically white blood cells (WBC) and red blood cells (RBC). Accurate and efficient diagnosis of these conditions significantly depends on the expertise of hematologists and pathologists. To assist the pathologist in the diagnostic process, there has been growing interest in utilizing computer-aided diagnostic (CAD) techniques, particularly those using medical image processing and machine learning algorithms. Previous surveys in this domain have been narrowly focused, often only addressing specific areas like segmentation or classification but lacking a holistic view like segmentation, classification, feature extraction, dataset utilization, evaluation matrices, etc. Methodology: This survey aims to provide a comprehensive and systematic review of existing literature and research work in the field of blood image analysis using deep learning techniques. It particularly focuses on medical image processing techniques and deep learning algorithms that excel in the morphological characterization of WBCs and RBCs. The review is structured to cover four main areas: segmentation techniques, classification methodologies, descriptive feature selection, evaluation parameters, and dataset selection for the analysis of WBCs and RBCs. Results: Our analysis reveals several interesting trends and preferences among researchers. Regarding dataset selection, approximately 50% of research related to WBC segmentation and 60% for RBC segmentation opted for manually obtaining images rather than using a predefined dataset. When it comes to classification, 45% of the previous work on WBCs chose the ALL-IDB dataset, while a significant 73% of researchers focused on RBC classification decided to manually obtain images from medical institutions instead of utilizing predefined datasets. In terms of feature selection for classification, morphological features were the most popular, being chosen in 55% and 80% of studies related to WBC and RBC classification, respectively. Conclusion: The diagnostic accuracy for blood-related diseases like leukemia, anemia, lymphoma, and thalassemia can be significantly enhanced through the effective use of CAD techniques, which have evolved considerably in recent years. This survey provides a broad and in-depth review of the techniques being employed, from image segmentation to classification, feature selection, utilization of evaluation matrices, and dataset selection. The inconsistency in dataset selection suggests a need for standardized, high-quality datasets to strengthen the diagnostic capabilities of these techniques further. Additionally, the popularity of morphological features indicates that future research could further explore and innovate in this direction.

Precise segmentation of the nucleus is vital for computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) in cervical cytology. Automated delineation of the cervical nucleus has notorious challenges due to clumped cells, color variation, noise, and fuzzy boundaries. Due to its standout performance in medical image analysis, deep learning has gained attention from other techniques. We have proposed a deep learning model, namely C-UNet (Cervical-UNet), to segment cervical nuclei from overlapped, fuzzy, and blurred cervical cell smear images. Cross-scale features integration based on a bi-directional feature pyramid network (BiFPN) and wide context unit are used in the encoder of classic UNet architecture to learn spatial and local features. The decoder of the improved network has two inter-connected decoders that mutually optimize and integrate these features to produce segmentation masks. Each component of the proposed C-UNet is extensively evaluated to judge its effectiveness on a complex cervical cell dataset. Different data augmentation techniques were employed to enhance the proposed model’s training. Experimental results have shown that the proposed model outperformed extant models, i.e., CGAN (Conditional Generative Adversarial Network), DeepLabv3, Mask-RCNN (Region-Based Convolutional Neural Network), and FCN (Fully Connected Network), on the employed dataset used in this study and ISBI-2014 (International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging 2014), ISBI-2015 datasets. The C-UNet achieved an object-level accuracy of 93%, pixel-level accuracy of 92.56%, object-level recall of 95.32%, pixel-level recall of 92.27%, Dice coefficient of 93.12%, and F1-score of 94.96% on complex cervical images dataset.

The automatic detection of blood cell elements for identifying morphological deformities is still a challenging research domain. It has a pivotal role in cognition and detecting the severity level of disease. Using a simple microscope, manual disease detection, and morphological disorders in blood cells is mostly time-consuming and erroneous. Due to the overlapped structure of RBCs, pathologists face challenges in differentiating between normal and abnormal cell shape and size precisely. Currently, convolutional neural network-based algorithms are effective tools for addressing this issue. Existing techniques fail to provide effective anemia detection, and severity level prediction due to RBCs’ dense and overlapped structure, non-availability of standard datasets related to blood diseases, and severity level detection techniques. This work proposed a three tier deep convolutional fused network (3-TierDCFNet) to extract optimum morphological features and identify anemic images to predict the severity of anemia. The proposed model comprises two modules: Module-I classifies the input image into two classes, i.e., Healthy and Anemic, while Module-II detects the anemia severity level and categorizes it into Mild or Chronic. After each tier’s training, a validation function is employed to reduce the inappropriate feature selection. To authenticate the proposed model for healthy, anemic RBC classification and anemia severity level detection, a state-of-the-art anemic and healthy RBC dataset was developed in collaboration with Shaukat Khanum Hospital and Research Center (SKMCH&RC), Pakistan. To evaluate the proposed model, the training, validation, and test accuracies were computed along with recall, F1-Score, and specificity. The global results reveal that the proposed model achieved 91.37%, 88.85%, and 86.06% training, validation, and test accuracies with 98.95%, 98.12%, and 98.12% recall F1-Score and specificity, respectively.

Blood smear analysis is often used to diagnose diseases like malaria, Anemia, Leukemia, etc. Morphological changes, such as size, shapes, and color, are receiving much attention in pathological analysis. Existing methods for detecting, diagnosing and analyzing blood smears cannot quantify overlapped, irregular boundaries and complex structures. This work proposes and evaluates a framework that utilizes Generative adversarial networks (GANs) for the segmentation and classification of blood elements, that is, white blood cells (WBCs), red blood cells (RBCs), and platelets (PLTs) simultaneously. The Generator of the network determines the mapping from microscopic images of blood cells to a confidence map. This mapping stipulates the probabilities of the pixel of the microscopic blood cell images with respect to ground truth. The Discriminator of the network is essential to castigate the mismatch between the microscopic blood cells images and confidence map. Additionally, adversarial learning enables the Generator to generate a qualitative confidence map that is converted into segmented images. We have calculated minimum, maximum, and average losses to judge the performance of the proposed model. We measure structural similarity, peak signal-to-noise ratio, pixel classification error, and finally, classified cells. The proposed framework can analyze all the blood cell elements simultaneously. The proposed framework shows a significant improvement in the segmentation and classification of blood cell elements compared to state-of-the-art techniques. During the training process, generator total loss reduces by 12.18%, 5.39%, and 3.62% for RBCs, WBCs, and PLTs, respectively. Our results demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques, achieving the highest pixel correctly classified (PCC) ratio for the segmentation of blood cells as 99.8%, 93.4%, and 99.9% for WBCs, RBCs, and PLTs, respectively. Our framework attains 95.45% and 88.89% classification accuracy for WBCs on ALL-IDB-I and ALL-IDB-II datasets. The dataset used for this study can be found at https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1F7kZ1SRWUD9R6aHLMkj3wsjcHnvlGuwP?usp=sharing.

Pixel-level analysis of blood images plays a pivotal role in diagnosing blood-related diseases, especially Anaemia. These analyses mainly rely on an accurate diagnosis of morphological deformities like shape, size, and precise pixel counting. In traditional segmentation approaches, instance or object-based approaches have been adopted that are not feasible for pixel-level analysis. The convolutional neural network (CNN) model required a large dataset with detailed pixel-level information for the semantic segmentation of red blood cells in the deep learning domain. In current research work, we address these problems by proposing a multi-level deep convolutional encoder-decoder network along with two state-of-the-art healthy and Anaemic-RBC datasets. The proposed multi-level CNN model preserved pixel-level semantic information extracted in one layer and then passed to the next layer to choose relevant features. This phenomenon helps to precise pixel-level counting of healthy and anaemic-RBC elements along with morphological analysis. For experimental purposes, we proposed two state-of-the-art RBC datasets, i.e., Healthy-RBCs and Anaemic-RBCs dataset. Each dataset contains 1000 images, ground truth masks, relevant, complete blood count (CBC), and morphology reports for performance evaluation. The proposed model results were evaluated using crossmatch analysis with ground truth mask by finding IoU, individual training, validation, testing accuracies, and global accuracies using a 05-fold training procedure. This model got training, validation, and testing accuracies as 0.9856, 0.9760, and 0.9720 on the Healthy-RBC dataset and 0.9736, 0.9696, and 0.9591 on an Anaemic-RBC dataset. The IoU and BFScore of the proposed model were 0.9311, 0.9138, and 0.9032, 0.8978 on healthy and anaemic datasets, respectively.

Rapid development in sketch-to-image translation methods boosts the investigation procedure in law enforcement agencies. But, the large modality gap between manually generated sketches makes this task challenging. Generative adversarial network (GAN) and encoder-decoder approach are usually incorporated to accomplish sketch-to-image generation with promising results. This paper targets the sketch-to-image translation with heterogeneous face angles and lighting effects using a multi-level conditional generative adversarial network. The proposed multi-level cGAN work in four different phases. Three independent cGANs’ networks are incorporated separately into each stage, followed by a CNN classifier. The Adam stochastic gradient descent mechanism was used for training with a learning rate of 0.0002 and momentum estimates β1 and β2 as 0.5 and 0.999, respectively. The multi-level 3D-convolutional architecture help to preserve spatial facial attributes and pixel-level details. The 3D convolution and deconvolution guide the G1 , G2 and G3 to use additional features and attributes for encoding and decoding. This helps to preserve the direction, postures of targeted image attributes and special relationships among the whole image’s features. The proposed framework process the 3D-Convolution and 3D-Deconvolution using vectorization. This process takes the same time as 2D convolution but extracts more features and facial attributes. We used pre-trained ResNet-50, ResNet-101, and Mobile-Net to classify generated high-resolution images from sketches. We have also developed, and state-of-the-art Pakistani Politicians Face-sketch Dataset (PPFD) for experimental purposes. Result reveals that the proposed cGAN model’s framework outperforms with respect to Accuracy, Structural similarity index measure (SSIM), Signal to noise ratio (SNR), and Peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR).