Detection of Metastatic Breast Cancer from Whole-Slide Pathology Images Using an Ensemble Deep-Learning Method

Abstract

Background: Metastasis is the main cause of death toll among breast cancer patients. Since current approaches for diagnosis of lymph node metastases are time-consuming, deep learning (DL) algorithms with more speed and accuracy are explored for effective alternatives. Methods: A total of 220025 whole-slide pictures from patients’ lymph nodes were classified into two cohorts: testing and training. For metastatic cancer identification, we employed hybrid convolutional network models. The performance of our diagnostic system was verified using 57458 unlabeled images that utilized criteria that included accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and P-value. Results: The DL-based system that was automatically and exclusively capable of quantifying and identifying metastatic lymph nodes was engineered. Quantification was made with 98.84% accuracy. Moreover, the precision of VGG16 and Recall was 92.42% and 91.25%, respectively. Further experiments demonstrated that metastatic cancer differentiation levels could influence the recognition performance. Conclusion: Our engineered diagnostic complex showed an elevated level of precision and efficiency for lymph node diagnosis. Our innovative DL-based system has a potential to simplify pathological screening for metastasis in breast cancer patients.