Classification of histopathological whole slide images based on multiple weighted semi-supervised domain adaptation

Abstract

Deep learning has become more important in histopathological images classification for computer-aided cancer diagnosis. However, accurate histopathological image classification based on deep network relies on lots of labeled images, while the expert annotation of whole slide images (WSIs) is time-consuming and laborious. Therefore, how to obtain good classification results with limited labeled samples is still a major challenging task. To overcome the above difficulty, a deep transferred semi-supervised domain adaptation model (HisNet-SSDA) is proposed for classification of histopathological WSIs. Semi-supervised domain adaptation transfers knowledge from a label-rich source domain to a partially labeled target domain. First, a transferred pre-trained network HisNet is designed for high-level feature extraction of the randomly sampled patches from the source and target domains. Then the features of the two domains are aligned through semi-supervised domain adaptation utilizing a multiple weighted loss functions criterion which contains a novel manifold regularization term. The predicted probabilities of sampled patches are aggregated for the image-level classification. Classification results evaluated on two colon cancer datasets demonstrate the remarkable performance of the proposed method (accuracy: 94.32%±0.49%, sensitivity: 94.59%±0.46%, specificity: 94.06%±0.27% and accuracy: 91.92%±0.32%, sensitivity: 92.01%±0.47%, specificity: 91.83%±0.23%), which indicate that the proposed method can be an effective tool for WSIs classification in clinical practice.