Ensembling Neural Networks for Digital Pathology Images Classification and Segmentation

In the last years, neural networks have proven to be a powerful framework for various image analysis problems. However, some application domains have specific limitations. Notably, digital pathology is an example of such fields due to tremendous image sizes and quite limited number of training examples available. In this paper, we adopt state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks (CNN) architectures for digital pathology images analysis. We propose to classify image patches to increase effective sample size and then to apply an ensembling technique to build prediction for the original images. To validate the developed approaches, we conducted experiments with \textit{Breast Cancer Histology Challenge} dataset and obtained 90\% accuracy for the 4-class tissue classification task.

[1]  Kilian Q. Weinberger,et al.  Densely Connected Convolutional Networks , 2016, 2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).

[2]  George Lee,et al.  Image analysis and machine learning in digital pathology: Challenges and opportunities , 2016, Medical Image Anal..

[3]  Jian Sun,et al.  Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition , 2015, 2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).

[4]  Jean Serra,et al.  Image Analysis and Mathematical Morphology , 1983 .

[5]  Thomas Brox,et al.  U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation , 2015, MICCAI.

[6]  Yee-Wah Tsang,et al.  Validation of digital pathology imaging for primary histopathological diagnosis , 2016, Histopathology.

[7]  Andrew Janowczyk,et al.  Deep learning for digital pathology image analysis: A comprehensive tutorial with selected use cases , 2016, Journal of pathology informatics.

[8]  Jian Sun,et al.  Spatial Pyramid Pooling in Deep Convolutional Networks for Visual Recognition , 2014, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

[9]  J. S. Marron,et al.  A method for normalizing histology slides for quantitative analysis , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging: From Nano to Macro.

[10]  Tianqi Chen,et al.  XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System , 2016, KDD.

[11]  Jimmy Ba,et al.  Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization , 2014, ICLR.

[12]  Catarina Eloy,et al.  Classification of breast cancer histology images using Convolutional Neural Networks , 2017, PloS one.

[13]  Li Fei-Fei,et al.  ImageNet: A large-scale hierarchical image database , 2009, CVPR.