Abstract
Microvascular invasion (MVI) is a histological feature of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). It is the strongest feature related to HCC recurrence and survival after liver resection. However, its diagnosis is time consuming which requires pathologist to examine histopathological images at high resolution. A computer aided MVI detection system that improves the diagnosis efficiency and consistency is in demand. There are two challenges in MVI detection (1) MVI is formed by the same type of tumor cells as common cancer tissue (CCT) and (2) both MVI and CCT’s size varies significantly – from a few cells to thousands of cells. Inspired by pathologists’ routine reading procedure, we propose a 3-stage solution composed by cascaded networks to tackle this problem. In this framework, images are first analyzed by pixel-level cancer tissue segmentation, followed by region-level instance feature extraction, and then by slide-level comparison to detect MVI. To reduce inter-stage error accumulation, the system is designed in the way that later stage can learn and correct errors in the previous stages. To effectively conduct slide-level analysis, a novel convolutional graph neural network with short cut (sc-GCN) is proposed to solve the over-smoothing problem in classic GCN methods. Testing results on 90 WSI samples show that the proposed system achieves state-of-the-art performance on MVI detection.
Keywords
H. Chen, K. Wang, Y. Zhu—co-first author; S. Cheng, J. Yao—co-corresponding author
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Chen, H. et al. (2021). From Pixel to Whole Slide: Automatic Detection of Microvascular Invasion in Hepatocellular Carcinoma on Histopathological Image via Cascaded Networks. In: de Bruijne, M., et al. Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention – MICCAI 2021. MICCAI 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12908. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87237-3_19
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