Skip to main content
Log in

Classification and grade prediction of kidney cancer histological images using deep learning

  • Published:
Multimedia Tools and Applications Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Renal Cell Carcinoma (RCC) is the most common malignant tumor (85%) of kidney cancer and has a complex histological pattern and nuclear structure. The manual diagnosis of kidney cancer or any other cancer from histopathology image depends on the knowledge and experience of pathologists, and the pathologist’s experience influences the results. According to studies, the kind of histology in kidney cancer is related to the prognosis and course of treatment. Since the kind of histology, molecular profile, and stage of the disease all affect how the disease is treated, there is an essential need to develop an automated system that can precisely analyze the histopathological images of the disease. This work demonstrates how a deep learning framework can be used to predict and classify associated grades of RCC from provided haematoxylin and eosin (H &E) images. The proposed model focuses on two important tasks- First to capture and extract associated features from the H &E images of five different grades. Second, to classify the new set of unseen H &E images into five separate grades using the obtained features. The proposed architecture has been tested and experimented on two independent datasets containing H &E stained histopathology images. The proposed architecture has been examined using the following performance metrics namely precision, recall, F1 - score, accuracy, Floating-point operations (FLOPs), and the total number of parameters. The obtained results show that the proposed architecture attains better results over seven state-of-the-art deep learning architectures on two different H &E stained histopathology image datasets.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
$34.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5

Similar content being viewed by others

Data availability statement

The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

References

  1. Aatresh AA, Alabhya K, Lal S, Kini J, Saxena PU (2021) Livernet: efficient and robust deep learning model for automatic diagnosis of sub-types of liver hepatocellular carcinoma cancer from h &e stained liver histopathology images. Int J CARS 16(9):1549–1563

  2. Adeshina SA, Adedigba AP, Adeniyi AA, Aibinu AM (2018) Breast cancer histopathology image classification with deep convolutional neural networks. In: 2018 14th international conference on electronics computer and computation (ICECCO), pp 206–212. IEEE

  3. Alom MZ, Yakopcic C, Nasrin M, Taha TM, Asari VK et al (2019) Breast cancer classification from histopathological images with inception recurrent residual convolutional neural network. J Digit Imaging 32(4):605–617

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Baranwal N, Doravari P, Kachhoria R (2021) Classification of histopathology images of lung cancer using convolutional neural network (cnn). Disruptive Dev Biomed Appl, p 75

  5. Byeon S, Park J, Cho YA, Cho B-J (2022) Automated histological classification for digital pathology images of colonoscopy specimen via deep learning. Sci Rep 12(1):12804

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Chanchal AK, Lal S, Barnwal D, Sinha P, Arvavasu S, Kini J (2023) Evolution of livernet 2. x: Architectures for automated liver cancer grade classification from h &e stained liver histopathological images. Multimed Tools Appl 1–31

  7. Chanchal AK, Lal S, Kumar R, Kwak JT, Kini J (2023) A novel dataset and efficient deep learning framework for automated grading of renal cell carcinoma from kidney histopathology images. Sci Rep 13(5728)

  8. Gupta KD, Sharma DK, Ahmed S, Gupta H, Gupta D, Hsu C-H (2023) A novel lightweight deep learning-based histopathological image classification model for iomt. Neural Process Lett 55(1):205–228

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Dogar GM, Shahzad M, Fraz MM (2023) Attention augmented distance regression and classification network for nuclei instance segmentation and type classification in histology images. Biomed Signal Process Control 79:104199

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Dosovitskiy A, Beyer L, Kolesnikov A, Weissenborn D, Zhai X, Unterthiner T, Dehghani M, Minderer M, Heigold G, Gelly S et al (2010) An image is worth 16x16 words: transformers for image recognition at scale. arXiv:2010.11929

  11. Eerapu KK, Ashwath B, Lal S, Dell’Acqua F, Dhan AVN (2019) Dense refinement residual network for road extraction from aerial imagery data. IEEE Access 7:151764–151782

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Hameed Z, Garcia-Zapirain B, Aguirre JJ, Isaza-Ruget MA (2022) Multiclass classification of breast cancer histopathology images using multilevel features of deep convolutional neural network. Sci Rep 12(1):15600

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Han S, Hwang SI, Lee HJ (2019) The classification of renal cancer in 3-phase ct images using a deep learning method. J Digit Imaging 32(4):638–643

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. He K, Zhang X, Ren S, Sun J (2016) Deep residual learning for image recognition. In: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 770–778

  15. Hirra I, Ahmad M, Hussain A, Ashraf MU, Saeed IA, Qadri SF, Alghamdi AM, Alfakeeh AS (2021) Breast cancer classification from histopathological images using patch-based deep learning modeling. IEEE Access 9:24273–24287

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Howard AG, Zhu M, Chen B, Kalenichenko D, Wang W, Weyand T, Andreetto M, Adam H (2017) Mobilenets: Efficient convolutional neural networks for mobile vision applications. arXiv:1704.04861

  17. Hu J, Shen L, Sun G (2018) Squeeze-and-excitation networks. In: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 7132–7141

  18. Huang G, Liu Z, Van Der Maaten L, Weinberger KQ (2017) Densely connected convolutional networks. In: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 4700–4708

  19. Iizuka O, Kanavati F, Kato K, Rambeau M, Arihiro K, Tsuneki M (2020) Deep learning models for histopathological classification of gastric and colonic epithelial tumours. Sci Rep 10(1):1–11

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Jiang Y, Chen L, Zhang H, Xiao X (2019) Breast cancer histopathological image classification using convolutional neural networks with small se-resnet module. PloS one 14(3):e0214587

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Joseph AA, Abdullahi M, Junaidu SB, Ibrahim HH, Chiroma H (2022) Improved multi-classification of breast cancer histopathological images using handcrafted features and deep neural network (dense layer). Intell Syst Appl 14:200066

    Google Scholar 

  22. Khoshdeli M, Borowsky A, Parvin B (2018) Deep learning models differentiate tumor grades from h &e stained histology sections. In: 2018 40th Annual international conference of the IEEE engineering in medicine and biology society (EMBC), pp 620–623. IEEE

  23. Kingma DP, Ba JL (2015) Adam: A method for stochastic optimization. International Conference on Learning Representations ICLR. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.6980.pdf

  24. Koidl K (2013) Loss functions in classification tasks. School of Computer Science and Statistic Trinity College, Dublin

    Google Scholar 

  25. Kumar A, Vishwakarma A, Bajaj V (2023) Crccn-net: Automated framework for classification of colorectal tissue using histopathological images. Biomed Signal Process Control 79:104172

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Lal S, Desouza R, Maneesh M, Kanfade A, Kumar A, Perayil G, Alabhya K, Chanchal KA, Kini J (2020) A robust method for nuclei segmentation of h &e stained histopathology images. In: 2020 7th International conference on signal processing and integrated networks (SPIN), pp 453–458. IEEE

  27. Mondol RK, Millar EKA, Graham PH, Browne L, Sowmya A, Meijering E (2023) hist2rna: an efficient deep learning architecture to predict gene expression from breast cancer histopathology images. Cancers 15(9):2569

    Article  Google Scholar 

  28. Motlagh MH, Jannesari M, Aboulkheyr H, Khosravi P, Elemento O, Totonchi M, Hajirasouliha I (2018) Breast cancer histopathological image classification: a deep learning approach. BioRxiv, p 242818

  29. Moyes A, Gault R, Zhang K, Ming J, Crookes D, Wang J (2023) Multi-channel auto-encoders for learning domain invariant representations enabling superior classification of histopathology images. Med Image Anal 83:102640

    Article  Google Scholar 

  30. Nahid A-A, Mehrabi MA, Kong Y (2018) Histopathological breast cancer image classification by deep neural network techniques guided by local clustering. BioMed Res Int 2018

  31. Narayanan BN, Krishnaraja V, Ali R (2019) Convolutional neural network for classification of histopathology images for breast cancer detection. In: 2019 IEEE National aerospace and electronics conference (NAECON), pp 291–295. IEEE

  32. Shahidi F, Daud SM, Abas H, Ahmad NA, Maarop N (2020) Breast cancer classification using deep learning approaches and histopathology image: a comparison study. IEEE Access 8:187531–187552

    Article  Google Scholar 

  33. Spanhol FA, Oliveira LS, Petitjean C, Heutte L (2016) Breast cancer histopathological image classification using convolutional neural networks. In: 2016 international joint conference on neural networks (IJCNN), pp 2560–2567. IEEE

  34. Srikantamurthy MM, Rallabandi VP, Dudekula DB, Natarajan S, Park J (2023) Classification of benign and malignant subtypes of breast cancer histopathology imaging using hybrid cnn-lstm based transfer learning. BMC Med Imaging 23(1):1–15

    Article  Google Scholar 

  35. Sun C, Xu A, Liu D, Xiong Z, Zhao F, Ding W (2019) Deep learning-based classification of liver cancer histopathology images using only global labels. IEEE J Biomed Health Inf 24(6):1643–1651

    Article  Google Scholar 

  36. Sun K, Chen Y, Bai B, Gao Y, Xiao J, Yu G (2023) Automatic classification of histopathology images across multiple cancers based on heterogeneous transfer learning. Diagnostics 13(7):1277

    Article  Google Scholar 

  37. Szegedy C, Ioffe S, Vanhoucke V, Alemi AA (2017) Inception-v4, inception-resnet and the impact of residual connections on learning. In: Thirty-first AAAI conference on artificial intelligence

  38. Szegedy C, Vanhoucke V, Ioffe S, Shlens J, Wojna Z (2016) Rethinking the inception architecture for computer vision. In: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 2818–2826

  39. Toğaçar M, Özkurt KB, Ergen B, Cömert Z (2020) Breastnet: a novel convolutional neural network model through histopathological images for the diagnosis of breast cancer. Phys A: Stat Mech Appl 545:123592

    Article  Google Scholar 

  40. Wakili MA, Shehu HA, Sharif MH, Sharif MHU, Umar A, Kusetogullari H, Ince IF, Uyaver S et al (2022) Classification of breast cancer histopathological images using densenet and transfer learning. Comput Intell Neurosci 2022

  41. Woo S, Park J, Lee J-Y, Kweon IS (2018) Cbam: Convolutional block attention module. In: Proceedings of the European conference on computer vision (ECCV), pp 3–19

  42. Xie S, Girshick R, Dollár P, Tu Z, He K (2017) Aggregated residual transformations for deep neural networks. In: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 1492–1500

  43. Yan R, Ren F, Wang Z, Wang L, Zhang T, Liu Y, Rao X, Zheng C, Zhang F (2020) Breast cancer histopathological image classification using a hybrid deep neural network. Methods 173:52–60

    Article  Google Scholar 

  44. Zhang X, Zhou X, Lin M, Sun J (2018) Shufflenet: An extremely efficient convolutional neural network for mobile devices. In: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 6848–6856

Download references

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the handling editor, editor-in-chief, and anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions and comments which helped to improve the quality of the research paper.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Amit Kumar Chanchal or Shyam Lal.

Ethics declarations

Conflicts of interest

Authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Chanchal, A.K., N, S., Lal, S. et al. Classification and grade prediction of kidney cancer histological images using deep learning. Multimed Tools Appl 83, 78247–78267 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-024-18639-5

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-024-18639-5

Keywords