AI-Assisted Detection for Early Screening of Acute Myeloid Leukemia Using Infrared Spectra and Clinical Biochemical Reports of Blood

Early detection and accurate diagnosis of leukemia pose significant challenges due to the disease's complexity and the need for minimally invasive methods. Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) accounts for most cases of adult leukemia, and our goal is to screen out some AML from adults. In this work, we introduce an AI-enhanced system designed to facilitate early screening and diagnosis of AML among adults. Our approach combines the infrared absorption spectra of serum measured with attenuated total reflectance Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR), which identifies distinctive molecular signatures in lyophilized serum, together with standard clinical blood biochemical test results. We developed a multi-modality spectral transformer network (MSTNetwork) to generate latent space feature vectors from these datasets. Subsequently, these vectors were assessed using a linear discriminant analysis (LDA) algorithm to estimate the likelihood of acute myeloid leukemia. By analyzing blood samples from leukemia patients and the negative control (including non-leukemia patients and healthy individuals), we achieved rapid and accurate prediction and identification of acute myeloid leukemia among adults. Compared to conventional methods relying solely on either FTIR spectra or biochemical indicators of blood, our multi-modality classification system demonstrated higher accuracy and sensitivity, ultimately achieving an accuracy of 98% and a sensitivity of 98%, improving the sensitivity by 12% (compared with using only biochemical indicators) or over 6% (compared with using only FTIR spectra). Our multi-modality classification system is also very robust as it gave much smaller standard deviations of the accuracy and sensitivity. Beyond improving early detection, this work also contributes to a more sustainable and intelligent healthcare sector.