A Pyramid Architecture-Based Deep Learning Framework for Breast Cancer Detection

Abstract

Breast cancer diagnosis is a critical step in clinical decision making, and this is achieved by making a pathological slide and gives a decision by the doctors, which is the method of final decision making for cancer diagnosis. Traditionally, the doctors usually check the pathological images by visual inspection under the microscope. Whole-slide images (WSIs) have supported the state-of-the-art diagnosis results and have been admitted as the gold standard clinically. However, this task is time-consuming and labour-intensive, and all of these limitations make low efficiency in decision making. Medical image processing protocols have been used for this task during the last decades and have obtained satisfactory results under some conditions; especially in the deep learning era, it has exhibited the advantages than those in the shallow learning period. In this paper, we proposed a novel breast cancer region mining framework based on deep pyramid architecture from multilevel and multiscale breast pathological WSIs. We incorporate the tissue- and cell-level information together and integrate these into a LSTM model for the final sequence modelling, which successfully keeps the WSIs integration and is not mentioned by the prevalence frameworks. The experiment results demonstrated that our proposed framework greatly improved the detection accuracy than that only using tissue-level information.