Background: Accurate and early detection of hematological disorders from microscopic peripheral blood smear images remains a technically challenging task due to inherent imaging limitations, including noise contamination, low contrast, staining variability, and significant cellular overlap. Conventional deep learning-based object detection frameworks often exhibit limited robustness under such conditions and demonstrate reduced sensitivity to small-scale morphological structures, particularly platelets and abnormal cell variants. Methods: To address these challenges, this study proposes a hybrid detection framework that integrates a fuzzy logic-driven image preprocessing module with the YOLOv11 object detection architecture. The proposed preprocessing pipeline employs adaptive fuzzy membership functions to normalize pixel intensity distributions, suppress high-frequency noise, and enhance edge-defined cellular boundaries. This transformation produces a structurally optimized feature representation, improving downstream feature extraction and localization performance. The proposed framework was evaluated on a curated dataset of 3000 annotated microscopic blood smear images spanning five hematological classes. Results: Experimental results show that the fuzzy logic module improves mAP@0.5 by +3.4% and mAP@0.5:0.95 by +3.6%, confirming its effectiveness in enhancing both classification and localization accuracy. Conclusions: These findings demonstrate the robustness and practical applicability of the proposed hybrid approach under challenging imaging conditions.
Kutlimuratov et al. (Wed,) studied this question.