Patch-level classification of brain tumor tissue in digital histopathology slides with Deep Learning

Abstract: Histopathology refers to the visual inspection of tissue under the microscope and it is the core part of diagnosis. The process of manual inspection of histopathology slides is very time-consuming for pathologists and error-prone. Furthermore, diagnosis can sometimes differ among specialists. In recent years, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have demonstrated remarkable performances in the classification of digital histopathology images. However, due to their high resolution, whole-slide images are of immense size, often gigapixels, making it infeasible to train CNNs directly on them. For that, patch-level classification is used instead. In this study, a deep learning approach for patch-level classification of glioblastoma (i.e. brain cancer) tissue is proposed. Four different state-of-the-art models were evaluated (MobileNetV2, ResNet50, ResNet152V2, and VGG16), with MobileNetV2 being the best among them, achieving 80% test accuracy. The study also proposes a scratch-trained CNN architecture, inspired by the popular VGG16 model, which achieved 81% accuracy. Both models scored 87% test accuracy when trained with data augmentation. All models were trained and tested on randomly sampled patches from the Ivy GAP dataset, which consisted of 724 H&E images in total. Finally, as patch-level predictions cannot be used explicitly by pathologists, prediction results from two slides were presented in the form of whole-slide images. Post-processing was also performed on those two predicted WSIs in order to make use of the spatial correlations among the patches and increase the classification accuracy. The models were statistically compared using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test.