Abstract
White blood cell (WBC) classification plays a crucial role in hematopathology and clinical diagnostics. However, traditional methods are constrained by limited receptive fields and insufficient utilization of contextual information, which hinders classification performance. To address these limitations, this paper proposes an enhanced WBC classification algorithm, CCE-YOLOv7, which is built upon the YOLOv7 framework. The proposed method introduces four key innovations to enhance detection accuracy and model efficiency: (1) A novel Conv2Former (Convolutional Transformer) backbone was designed to combine the local pattern extraction capability of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with the global contextual reasoning of transformers, thereby improving the expressiveness of feature representation. (2) The CARAFE (Content-Aware ReAssembly of Features) upsampling operator was adopted to replace conventional interpolation methods, thereby enhancing the spatial resolution and semantic richness of feature maps. (3) An Efficient Multi-scale Attention (EMA) module was introduced to refine multi-scale feature fusion, enabling the model to better focus on spatially relevant features critical for WBC classification. (4) Soft-NMS (Soft Non-Maximum Suppression) was used instead of traditional NMS to better preserve true positives in densely packed or overlapping cell scenarios, thereby reducing false positives and false negatives. Experimental validation was conducted on a WBC image dataset acquired using the Fourier ptychographic microscopy (FPM) system. The proposed CCE-YOLOv7 achieved a detection accuracy of 89.3%, showing a 7.8% improvement over the baseline YOLOv7. Furthermore, CCE-YOLOv7 reduced the number of parameters by 2 million and lowered computational complexity by 5.7 GFLOPs, offering an efficient and lightweight model suitable for real-time clinical applications. To further evaluate model effectiveness, comparative experiments were conducted with YOLOv8 and YOLOv11. CCE-YOLOv7 achieved a 4.1% higher detection accuracy than YOLOv8 while reducing computational cost by 2.4 GFLOPs. Compared with the more advanced YOLOv11, CCE-YOLOv7 maintained competitive accuracy (only 0.6% lower) while using significantly fewer parameters and 4.3 GFLOPs less in computation, highlighting its superior trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. These results demonstrate that CCE-YOLOv7 provides a robust, accurate, and computationally efficient solution for automated WBC classification, with significant clinical applicability.