Label‐Free Identification of White Blood Cells Using Machine Learning
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
White blood cell (WBC) differential counting is an established clinical routine to assess patient immune system status. Fluorescent markers and a flow cytometer are required for the current state-of-the-art method for determining WBC differential counts. However, this process requires several sample preparation steps and may adversely disturb the cells. We present a novel label-free approach using an imaging flow cytometer and machine learning algorithms, where live, unstained WBCs were classified. It achieved an average F1-score of 97% and two subtypes of WBCs, B and T lymphocytes, were distinguished from each other with an average F1-score of 78%, a task previously considered impossible for unlabeled samples. We provide an open-source workflow to carry out the procedure. We validated the WBC analysis with unstained samples from 85 donors. The presented method enables robust and highly accurate identification of WBCs, minimizing the disturbance to the cells and leaving marker channels free to answer other biological questions. It also opens the door to employing machine learning for liquid biopsy, here, using the rich information in cell morphology for a wide range of diagnostics of primary blood. © 2019 The Authors. Cytometry Part A published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of International Society for Advancement of Cytometry.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it