Improving the sub-image classification of invasive ductal carcinoma in histology images

Whole  slide image (WSI) processing is a common technique used in the analysis process performed by pathologists. Identifying precise and accurate regions of cancerous in the tissue is an important process in the disease diagnosis modality. This work proposes an automated technique for identifying invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC) in histology images using. An image is divided into small non-overlapped patches (or image windows). Then, the task is to classify the image patches into different classes, i.e., i) IDC and ii) non-IDC. We employ a two-stage classification-based to classify the patches, as to identify IDC regions in the tissue. In the first stage (patch-level classification), image patch classification is carried out using a conventional handcrafted feature and deep-learning technique are explored. The second stage (post-processing) undergoes a refinement process, which considers the spatial relationships between the neighboring patches. This stage aims to amend some of miss-classified patches. Markov random field (MRF) is implemented in this stage to examine the relationships of the patches and their neighborhoods. The experiments are conducted on public dataset. The experimental results show the post-processing can improve the performance of the classification in the first stage using the handcrafted-based technique and deep learning.