Automatic mitosis detection in breast histopathology images using Convolutional Neural Network based deep transfer learning

Abstract

The exact measure of mitotic count is one of the crucial parameters in breast cancer grading and prognosis. Detection of mitosis in standard H & E stained histopathology images is challenging due to diffused intensities along object boundaries and shape variation in different stages of mitosis. This paper explores the feasibility of transfer learning for mitosis detection. A pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network is transformed by coupling random forest classifier with the initial fully connected layers to extract discriminant features from nuclei patches and to precisely prognosticate the class label of cell nuclei. The modified Convolutional Neural Network accurately classify the detected cell nuclei with limited training data. The designed framework accomplishes higher classification accuracy by carefully fine tuning the pre-trained model and pre-processing the extracted features. Moreover, proposed method is evaluated on MITOS dataset provided for the MITOS-ATYPIA contest 2014 and clinical data set from Regional Cancer Centre, Thiruvananthapuram, India. Significance of Convolutional Neural Network based method is justified by comparing with recently reported works including a Multi Classifier System based on Deep Belief Network. Experiments show that the pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network model outperforms conventionally used detection systems and provides at least 15% improvement in F-score on other state-of-the-art techniques.