Machine learning methods for histopathological image analysis

Abundant accumulation of digital histopathological images has led to the increased demand for their analysis, such as computer-aided diagnosis using machine learning techniques. However, digital pathological images and related tasks have some issues to be considered. In this mini-review, we introduce the application of digital pathological image analysis using machine learning algorithms, address some problems specific to such analysis, and propose possible solutions.Comment: 23 pages, 4 figure

Automate Nuclei Detection Using Neural Networks

Nuclei identification is a pivotal first step in many areas of biomedical research. Pathologists often observe images containing microscopic nuclei as part of their day to day jobs. During research, pathologists must identify nuclei characteristics from microscopic images such as: volume of nuclei, size, density and individual position within image. The pathology field can benefit from image detection enhancements done through the use of computer image segmentation techniques. This research presents methods that can be used to identify all the cell nuclei contained in images. Multiple techniques were experimented with such as edge detection and Convolutional Neural Networks with U-Net architecture. The data for training these models was sourced from the 2018 Data Science Bowl sponsored by Kaggle and Booz, Allen, Hamilton. As a result, there were various methods identified to assist the pathology industry for automating nuclei detection by using computer image detection methods. These computer methods rapidly process images for research purposes, with a reasonably high accuracy which has the potential to greatly accelerate the pace of research

Regression Concept Vectors for Bidirectional Explanations in Histopathology

Explanations for deep neural network predictions in terms of domain-related concepts can be valuable in medical applications, where justifications are important for confidence in the decision-making. In this work, we propose a methodology to exploit continuous concept measures as Regression Concept Vectors (RCVs) in the activation space of a layer. The directional derivative of the decision function along the RCVs represents the network sensitivity to increasing values of a given concept measure. When applied to breast cancer grading, nuclei texture emerges as a relevant concept in the detection of tumor tissue in breast lymph node samples. We evaluate score robustness and consistency by statistical analysis.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, 3 table

Automatic nuclei segmentation in H&E stained breast cancer histopathology images

The introduction of fast digital slide scanners that provide whole slide images has led to a revival of interest in image analysis applications in pathology. Segmentation of cells and nuclei is an important first step towards automatic analysis of digitized microscopy images. We therefore developed an automated nuclei segmentation method that works with hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) stained breast cancer histopathology images, which represent regions of whole digital slides. The procedure can be divided into four main steps: 1) pre-processing with color unmixing and morphological operators, 2) marker-controlled watershed segmentation at multiple scales and with different markers, 3) post-processing for rejection of false regions and 4) merging of the results from multiple scales. The procedure was developed on a set of 21 breast cancer cases (subset A) and tested on a separate validation set of 18 cases (subset B). The evaluation was done in terms of both detection accuracy (sensitivity and positive predictive value) and segmentation accuracy (Dice coefficient). The mean estimated sensitivity for subset A was 0.875 (±0.092) and for subset B 0.853 (±0.077). The mean estimated positive predictive value was 0.904 (±0.075) and 0.886 (±0.069) for subsets A and B, respectively. For both subsets, the distribution of the Dice coefficients had a high peak around 0.9, with the vast majority of segmentations having values larger than 0.8. © 2013 Veta et al