Joint DBN and Fuzzy C-Means unsupervised deep clustering for lung cancer patient stratification

Abstract Patient stratification has made a great contribution to efficient and personalized medicine. An important task in patient stratification is to discover quite distinct disease subtypes for effective treatment. In this paper, we propose a new deep learning and clustering model which combines Deep Belief Network (DBN) and Fuzzy C-Means(FCM), called Unsupervised Deep Fuzzy C-Means clustering Network(UDFCMN), to cluster lung cancer patients from lung CT images. In our deep clustering network, images after preprocessing are first encoded into multiple layers of hidden variables to extract hierarchical features and feature distribution and form the high-level representations. Here, to solve the problem of feature homogenization in DBN, we introduce the Winner-Take-All (WTA) idea to meliorate the traditional DBN structure, called WTADBN. Then FCM is used to produce the initial cluster labels with the new representations learnt by stacked WTARBM. Therefore, the FCM-generated cluster labels are used for the fine-tuning of the DBN as ground-truth labels. And an unsupervised image clustering and patient stratification process is completed by cross iteration. We tested our deep FCM clustering algorithm to do experiment on both public dataset from the internet and private dataset from cooperate hospital. For the latter one, the clinical and biological verification was also performed. Experimental results reveal outperformance of UDFCMN as compared to the state-of-the-art unsupervised classification methods. These results also indicate that our approach may have practical applications in lung cancer pathogenesis studies and provide useful guidelines for personalized cancer therapy.