Multiscale deformed attention networks for white blood cell detection.
Journal:
Scientific reports
PMID:
40287499
Abstract
White blood cell (WBC) detection is pivotal in medical diagnostics, crucial for diagnosing infections, inflammations, and certain cancers. Traditional WBC detection methods are labor-intensive and time-consuming. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are widely used for cell detection due to their strong feature extraction capability. However, they struggle with global information and long-distance dependencies in WBC images. Transformers, on the other hand, excel at modeling long-range dependencies, which improves their performance in vision tasks. To tackle the large foreground-background differences in WBC images, this paper introduces a novel WBC detection method, named the Multi-Scale Cross-Deformation Attention Fusion Network (MCDAF-Net), which combines CNNs and Transformers. The Attention Multi-scale Sensing Module (AMSM) is designed to localize WBCs more accurately by fusing features at different scales and enhancing feature representation through a self-attention mechanism. The Cross-Deformation Convolution Module (CDCM) reduces feature correlation, aiding the model in capturing diverse aspects and patterns in images, thereby improving generalization. MCDAF-Net outperforms other models on public datasets (LISC, BCCD, and WBCDD), demonstrating its superiority in WBC detection. Our code and pretrained models: https://github.com/xqq777/MCDAF-Net .