AUTOMATED COLITIS DETECTION FROM ENDOSCOPIC BIOPSIES AS A TISSUE SCREENING TOOL IN DIAGNOSTIC PATHOLOGY.

Michael T Mccann,John A Ozolek,Matthew C Fickus,Jelena Kovacevic,Ramamurthy Bhagavatula

doi:10.1109/icip.2012.6467483

Abstract

We present a method for identifying colitis in colon biopsies as an extension of our framework for the automated identification of tissues in histology images. Histology is a critical tool in both clinical and research applications, yet even mundane histological analysis, such as the screening of colon biopsies, must be carried out by highly-trained pathologists at a high cost per hour, indicating a niche for potential automation. To this end, we build upon our previous work by extending the histopathology vocabulary (a set of features based on visual cues used by pathologists) with new features driven by the colitis application. We use the multiple-instance learning framework to allow our pixel-level classifier to learn from image-level training labels. The new system achieves accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art biological image classifiers with fewer and more intuitive features.

Highlights

Screening for colitis based on microscopic review of tissue sections taken by endoscopic biopsy occupies a prominent position in the overall practice of a general pathologist
To understand how to adapt our pixel-level classifier (PLC) training to this problem, we look at the classification task in the multipleinstance learning (MIL) framework [9]
We compared the performance of the PLC-MIL to two freely avail able biological image classifiers

Summary

Introduction

Screening for colitis based on microscopic review of tissue sections taken by endoscopic biopsy occupies a prominent position in the overall practice of a general pathologist. Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD; which includes ulcerative colitis and Crohns disease) is a major cause of colitis in children and adults and contributes heavily to the need for endoscopic biopsy both for diagnosis and subsequent follow-up after treatment. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 1.4 million people have IBD, creating a health care cost of $1.7 billion [1]. Based on this estimation, the number of endoscopic biopsies of the colon for suspected IBD only (not including endoscopies done for other clinical scenarios) would be substantially greater since more individuals will undergo endoscopy biopsy than have actual disease. At CHP, approximately 1200 biopsies of the colon were done in 2011 out of approximately 3500–4000 endoscopies performed

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