A Deep Learning Approach for Breast Invasive Ductal Carcinoma Detection and Lymphoma Multi-Classification in Histological Images

Accurately identifying and categorizing cancer structures/sub-types in histological images is an important clinical task involving a considerable workload and a specific subspecialty of pathologists. Digitizing pathology is a current trend that provides large amounts of visual data allowing a faster and more precise diagnosis through the development of automatic image analysis techniques. Recent studies have shown promising results for the automatic analysis of cancer tissue by using deep learning strategies that automatically extract and organize the discriminative information from the data. This paper explores deep learning methods for the automatic analysis of Hematoxylin and Eosin stained histological images of breast cancer and lymphoma. In particular, a deep learning approach is proposed for two different use cases: the detection of invasive ductal carcinoma in breast histological images and the classification of lymphoma sub-types. Both use cases have been addressed by adopting a residual convolutional neural network that is part of a convolutional autoencoder network (i.e., FusionNet). The performances have been evaluated on the public datasets of digital histological images and have been compared with those obtained by using different deep neural networks (UNet and ResNet). Additionally, comparisons with the state of the art have been considered, in accordance with different deep learning approaches. The experimental results show an improvement of 5.06% in F-measure score for the detection task and an improvement of 1.09% in the accuracy measure for the classification task.