Deep Learning for Whole Slide Image Cytology : A Human-in-the-Loop Approach

Abstract: With cancer being one of the leading causes of death globally, and with oral cancers being among the most common types of cancer, it is of interest to conduct large-scale oral cancer screening among the general population. Deep Learning can be used to make this possible despite the medical expertise required for early detection of oral cancers. A bottleneck of Deep Learning is the large amount of data required to train a good model. This project investigates two topics: certainty calibration, which aims to make a machine learning model produce more reliable predictions, and Active Learning, which aims to reduce the amount of data that needs to be labeled for Deep Learning to be effective. In the investigation of certainty calibration, five different methods are compared, and the best method is found to be Dirichlet calibration. The Active Learning investigation studies a single method, Cost-Effective Active Learning, but it is found to produce poor results with the given experiment setting. These two topics inspire the further development of the cytological annotation tool CytoBrowser, which is designed with oral cancer data labeling in mind. The proposedevolution integrates into the existing tool a Deep Learning-assisted annotation workflow that supports multiple users.