A Deep Learning Framework for Automatic Diagnosis in Lung Cancer

Nikolay Burlutskiy, Max Backman, Feng Gu, Lena Kajland Wilen, Patrick Micke

Abstract: We developed a deep learning framework that helps to automatically identify and segment lung cancer areas in patients' tissue specimens. The study was based on a cohort of lung cancer patients operated at the Uppsala University Hospital. The tissues were reviewed by lung pathologists and then the cores were compiled to tissue micro-arrays (TMAs). For experiments, hematoxylin-eosin stained slides from 712 patients were scanned and then manually annotated. Then these scans and annotations were used to train segmentation models of the developed framework. The performance of the developed deep learning framework was evaluated on fully annotated TMA cores from 178 patients reaching pixel-wise precision of 0.80 and recall of 0.86. Finally, publicly available Stanford TMA cores were used to demonstrate high performance of the framework qualitatively.

Author Affiliation: ContextVision AB, Uppsala University, Sweden

Keywords: Deep Learning, Semantic Segmentation, Lung Cancer, Digital Pathology