Nuclei grading of clear cell renal cell carcinoma in histopathological image by composite high-resolution network

作     者：Gao, Zeyu Shi, Jiangbo Zhang, Xianli Li, Yang Zhang, Haichuan Wu, Jialun Wang, Chunbao Meng, Deyu Li, Chen 

作者机构：School of Computer Science and Technology Xi'an Jiaotong University Shaanxi Xi'an710049 China National Engineering Lab for Big Data Analytics Xi'an Jiaotong University Shaanxi Xi'an710049 China Department of Pathology The First Affiliated Hospital of Xi'an Jiaotong University Xi'an710061 China School of Mathematics and Statistics Xi'an Jiaotong University Shaanxi Xi'an710049 China 

出 版 物：《arXiv》 (arXiv)

年 卷 期：2021年

核心收录：

主　　题：Grading 

摘      要：The grade of clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) is a critical prognostic factor, making ccRCC nuclei grading a crucial task in RCC pathology analysis. Computer-aided nuclei grading aims to improve pathologists work efficiency while reducing their misdiagnosis rate by automatically identifying the grades of tumor nuclei within histopathological images. Such a task requires precisely segment and accurately classify the nuclei. However, most of the existing nuclei segmentation and classification methods can not handle the inter-class similarity property of nuclei grading, thus can not be directly applied to the ccRCC grading task. In this paper, we propose a Composite High-Resolution Network for ccRCC nuclei grading. Specifically, we propose a segmentation network called W-Net that can separate the clustered nuclei. Then, we recast the fine-grained classification of nuclei to two cross-category classification tasks, based on two high-resolution feature extractors (HRFEs) which are proposed for learning these two tasks. The two HRFEs share the same backbone encoder with W-Net by a composite connection so that meaningful features for the segmentation task can be inherited for the classification task. Last, a head-fusion block is applied to generate the predicted label of each nucleus. Furthermore, we introduce a dataset for ccRCC nuclei grading, containing 1000 image patches with 70945 annotated nuclei. We demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing methods on this large ccRCC grading dataset. © 2021, CC BY.