WBCAtt: A White Blood Cell Dataset Annotated with Detailed Morphological Attributes

Satoshi Tsutsui, Winnie Pang, Bihan Wen

Keywords: white blood cells, morphological attributes, microscopic image, explainable AI, computer vision

TL;DR: We annotated 11 fine-grained attributes for each of the 10k microscopic images of white blood cells (WBCs) because no prior WBC dataset included them, despite their significance in explaining how to recognize different WBC types.

Abstract: The examination of blood samples at a microscopic level plays a fundamental role in clinical diagnostics. For instance, an in-depth study of White Blood Cells (WBCs), a crucial component of our blood, is essential for diagnosing blood-related diseases such as leukemia and anemia. While multiple datasets containing WBC images have been proposed, they mostly focus on cell categorization, often lacking the necessary morphological details to explain such categorizations, despite the importance of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) in medical domains. This paper seeks to address this limitation by introducing comprehensive annotations for WBC images. Through collaboration with pathologists, a thorough literature review, and manual inspection of microscopic images, we have identified 11 morphological attributes associated with the cell and its components (nucleus, cytoplasm, and granules). We then annotated ten thousand WBC images with these attributes, resulting in 113k labels (11 attributes x 10.3k images). Annotating at this level of detail and scale is unprecedented, offering unique value to AI in pathology. Moreover, we conduct experiments to predict these attributes from cell images, and also demonstrate specific applications that can benefit from our detailed annotations. Overall, our dataset paves the way for interpreting WBC recognition models, further advancing XAI in the fields of pathology and hematology.

Submission Number: 3