The development of blood cell image classification models is often hindered by the scarcity of labeled data. This study evaluates the effectiveness of supervised baseline models, supervised fine-tuning, and self-supervised learning (SSL) based on SimCLR and BYOL using the ResNet-50 and DenseNet-121 architectures. Data-limited simulation was performed using 10% labeled data for the classification stage and 90% unlabeled data for SSL pre-training on 17,092 images from 8 morphological classes. The results show that SSL achieves competitive performance, with the highest accuracy on ResNet-50 at 95.31% (SimCLR) and 94.27% (BYOL), and on DenseNet-121 at 93.75% (SimCLR) and 89.58% (BYOL). The SSL approach also demonstrated robustness against overfitting, good robustness against class imbalance, and Grad-CAM visualizations that align with medical expert assessments on ResNet-50. In conclusion, SSL effectively optimizes unlabeled data to improve the performance of classification models in scenarios with limited data annotation.
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