Histology images with multi-gigapixel of resolution yield rich information for cancer diagnosis and prognosis. Most of the time, only slide-level label is available because pixel-wise annotation is labour intensive task. In this paper, we propose a deep learning pipeline for classification in histology images. Using multiple instance learning, we attempt to predict the latent membrane protein 1 (LMP1) status of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) based on haematoxylin and eosin-stain (H&E) histology images. We utilised attention mechanism with residual connection for our aggregation layers. In our 3-fold cross-validation experiment, we achieved average accuracy, AUC and F1-score 0.936, 0.995 and 0.862, respectively. This method also allows us to examine the model interpretability by visualising attention scores. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to predict LMP1 status on NPC using deep learning.

Researchers working on computational analysis of Whole Slide Images (WSIs) in histopathology have primarily resorted to patch-based modelling due to large resolution of each WSI. The large resolution makes WSIs infeasible to be fed directly into the machine learning models due to computational constraints. However, due to patch-based analysis, most of the current methods fail to exploit the underlying spatial relationship among the patches. In our work, we have tried to integrate this relationship along with feature-based correlation among the extracted patches from the particular tumorous region. For the given task of classification, we have used BiLSTMs to model both forward and backward contextual relationship. RNN based models eliminate the limitation of sequence size by allowing the modelling of variable size images within a deep learning model. We have also incorporated the effect of spatial continuity by exploring different scanning techniques used to sample patches. To establish the efficiency of our approach, we trained and tested our model on two datasets, microscopy images and WSI tumour regions. After comparing with contemporary literature we achieved the better performance with accuracy of 90% for microscopy image dataset. For WSI tumour region dataset, we compared the classification results with deep learning networks such as ResNet, DenseNet, and InceptionV3 using maximum voting technique. We achieved the highest performance accuracy of 84%. We found out that BiLSTMs with CNN features have performed much better in modelling patches into an end-to-end Image classification network. Additionally, the variable dimensions of WSI tumour regions were used for classification without the need for resizing. This suggests that our method is independent of tumour image size and can process large dimensional images without losing the resolution details.

Accurate brain tumour segmentation is a crucial step towards improving disease diagnosis and proper treatment planning. In this paper, we propose a deep-learning based method to segment a brain tumour into its subregions: whole tumour, tumour core and enhancing tumour. The proposed architecture is a 3D convolutional neural network based on a variant of the U-Net architecture of Ronneberger et al. [17] with three main modifications: (i) a heavy encoder, light decoder structure using residual blocks (ii) employment of dense blocks instead of skip connections, and (iii) utilization of self-ensembling in the decoder part of the network. The network was trained and tested using two different approaches: a multitask framework to segment all tumour subregions at the same time, and a three-stage cascaded framework to segment one subregion at a time. An ensemble of the results from both frameworks was also computed. To address the class imbalance issue, appropriate patch extraction was employed in a pre-processing step. Connected component analysis was utilized in the post-processing step to reduce the false positive predictions. Experimental results on the BraTS20 validation dataset demonstrates that the proposed model achieved average Dice Scores of 0.90, 0.82, and 0.78 for whole tumour, tumour core and enhancing tumour respectively. Keywords: Brain tumour segmentation, · Multimodal MRI, · Cascaded network, · Densely connected CNN.