Computer-aided diagnosis system of lung carcinoma using Convolutional Neural Networks

With the number of lung cancers’ morbidity and mortality is showing a trend of increasing year by year, the demand for pathologists is increasing rapidly, so in this study, we aimed to design a medical pathologically assistant diagnostic system to help pathologists complete diagnostic analysis tasks. A Deep Convolutional Neural Network(DCNN) is adopted to automatically distinguish tumor tissues from normal tissues in digitized hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) stained lung cell pathological slides that collected from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and collaborate hospitals, we trained and evaluate WSIs(the whole slide images) captured at 10x magnification and other higher magnification, results show the difference are negligible. Moreover, we also compared the training effect of different models on same level magnification WSIs, the results show that performance of Resnet-18 network model and Resnet-50 network model is nearly consistent. Actually processing time based on Resnet-18 model is shorter than Resnet-50 model, so we don’t need deeper network for study. Our system was shown to enormous advantages in accuracy, sensitivity and efficiency, could reduce the burden on pathologists, enable them to spend more time on advanced decision-making tasks, would be widely applied to pathological diagnosis, clinical practice, scientific research and so on.