WBC Image Segmentation Based on Residual Networks and Attentional Mechanisms.

White blood cell (WBC) morphology examination plays a crucial role in diagnosing many diseases. One of the most important steps in WBC morphology analysis is WBC image segmentation, which remains a challenging task. To address the problems of low segmentation accuracy caused by color similarity, uneven brightness, and irregular boundary between WBC regions and the background, a WBC image segmentation network based on U-Net combining residual networks and attention mechanism was proposed. Firstly, the ResNet50 residual block is used to form the main unit of the encoder structure, which helps to overcome the overfitting problem caused by a small number of training samples by improving the network's feature extraction capacity and loading the pretraining weight. Secondly, the SE module is added to the decoder structure to make the model pay more attention to useful features while suppressing useless ones. In addition, atrous convolution is utilized to recover full-resolution feature maps in the decoder structure to increase the receptive field of the convolution layer. Finally, network parameters are optimized using the Adam optimization technique in conjunction with the binary cross-entropy loss function. Experimental results on BCISC and LISC datasets show that the proposed approach has higher segmentation accuracy and robustness.