DAFFNet: A Dual Attention Feature Fusion Network for Classification of White Blood Cells

The precise categorization of white blood cell (WBC) is crucial for diagnosing blood-related disorders. However, manual analysis in clinical settings is time-consuming, labor-intensive, and prone to errors. Numerous studies have employed machine learning and deep learning techniques to achieve objective WBC classification, yet these studies have not fully utilized the information of WBC images. Therefore, our motivation is to comprehensively utilize the morphological information and high-level semantic information of WBC images to achieve accurate classification of WBC. In this study, we propose a novel dual-branch network Dual Attention Feature Fusion Network (DAFFNet), which for the first time integrates the high-level semantic features with morphological features of WBC to achieve accurate classification. Specifically, we introduce a dual attention mechanism, which enables the model to utilize the channel features and spatially localized features of the image more comprehensively. Morphological Feature Extractor (MFE), comprising Morphological Attributes Predictor (MAP) and Morphological Attributes Encoder (MAE), is proposed to extract the morphological features of WBC. We also implement Deep-supervised Learning (DSL) and Semi-supervised Learning (SSL) training strategies for MAE to enhance its performance. Our proposed network framework achieves 98.77%, 91.30%, 98.36%, 99.71%, 98.45%, and 98.85% overall accuracy on the six public datasets PBC, LISC, Raabin-WBC, BCCD, LDWBC, and Labelled, respectively, demonstrating superior effectiveness compared to existing studies. The results indicate that the WBC classification combining high-level semantic features and low-level morphological features is of great significance, which lays the foundation for objective and accurate classification of WBC in microscopic blood cell images.