Attention Residual Network for White Blood Cell Classification with WGAN Data Augmentation

In medicine, white blood cell (WBC) classification plays an important role in clinical diagnosis and treatment. Due to the similarity between classes and lack of training data, the precise classification of WBC is still challenging. To alleviate this problem, we propose an attention residual network for WBC image classification on the basis of data augmentation. Specifically, the attention residual network is composed of multiple attention residual blocks, an adaptive average pooling layer, and a full connection layer. The channel attention mechanism is introduced in each residual block to use the feature maps of WBC learned by a high layer to generate the attention map for a low layer. Each attention residual block also introduces depth separable convolution to extract the feature of WBC and decrease the training costs. The Wasserstein Generative adversarial network (WGAN) is used to create synthetic instances to enhance the size of training data. Experiments on two image datasets show the superiority of the proposed method over several state-of-the-art methods.