HemBLIP: A Vision-Language Model for Interpretable Leukemia Cell Morphology Analysis

Abstract: Microscopic evaluation of white blood cell morphology is central to leukemia diagnosis, yet current deep learning models often act as black boxes, limiting clinical trust and adoption. We introduce HemBLIP, a vision LLM designed to generate interpretable, morphology aware descriptions of peripheral blood cells. Using a newly constructed dataset of 14k healthy and leukemic cells paired with expert-derived attribute captions, we adapt a general-purpose VLM via both full fine-tuning and LoRA based parameter efficient training, and benchmark against the biomedical foundation model MedGEMMA. HemBLIP achieves higher caption quality and morphological accuracy, while LoRA adaptation provides further gains with significantly reduced computational cost. These results highlight the promise of vision LLMs for transparent and scalable hematological diagnostics.