Edge Computing Using Embedded Webserver with Mobile Device for Diagnosis and Prediction of Metastasis in Histopathological Images

Abstract

Diagnosis of different breast cancer stages using histopathology whole slide images is the gold standard in grading the tissue metastasis. Traditional diagnosis involves labor intensive procedures and is prone to human errors. Computer aided diagnosis assists medical experts as a second opinion tool in early detection which prevents further proliferation. Computing facilities have emerged to an extent where algorithms can attain near human accuracy in prediction of diseases, offering better treatment to curb further proliferation. The work introduced in the paper provides an interface in mobile platform, which enables the user to input histopathology image and obtain the prediction results with its class probability through embedded web-server. The trained deep convolutional neural networks model is deployed into a microcomputer-based embedded system after hyper-parameter tuning, offering congruent performance. The implementation results show that the embedded platform with custom-trained CNN model is suitable for medical image classification, as it takes less execution time and mean prediction time. It is also noticed that customized CNN classifier model outperforms pre-trained models when used in embedded platforms for prediction and classification of histopathology images. This work also emphasizes the relevance of portable and flexible embedded device in real time clinical applications.