A multi-resolution deep learning framework for lung adenocarcinoma growth pattern classification

Abstract

Identifying lung adenocarcinoma growth patterns is critical for diagnosis and treatment of lung cancer patients. Growth patterns have variable texture, shape, size and location. They could appear individually or fused together in a way that makes it difficult to avoid inter/intra variability in pathologists reports. Thus, employing a machine learning method to learn these patterns and automatically locate them within the tumour is indeed necessary. This will reduce the effort, assessment variability and provide a second opinion to support pathologies decision. To the best of our knowledge, no work has been done to classify growth patterns in lung adenocarcinoma. In this paper, we propose applying deep learning framework to perform lung adenocarcinoma pattern classification. We investigate what contextual information is adequate for training using patches extracted at several resolutions. We find that both cellular and architectural morphology features are required to achieve the best performance. Therefore, we propose using multi-resolution deep CNN for growth pattern classification in lung adenocarcinoma. Our preliminarily results show an increase in the overall classification accuracy.