Whole Slide Image Multi-Classification of Cervical Epithelial Lesions Based on Unsupervised Pre-training.

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Abstract

Cervical cancer has become one of the important factors threatening women’s health. Histopathological diagnosis is the most important criterion for cervical cancer diagnosis and treatment. Accurate classification of lesion degree of cervical epithelium by analyzing whole slide images (WSIs) can effectively improve the therapeutic effect and prognosis. However, classification of cervical lesion degree shows poor reproductivity due to lack of standardisation and is subjective among clinicians. In addition, due to the lack of large-scale finely annotated datasets, current deep learning methods do not perform well on this task. In this paper, we propose a two-stage method based on unsupervised pre-training to solve this multi-classification task. Our method first applied a patch-level network to predict the patch-level score and generate a heatmap that can highlight the lesion area. This network is pre-trained using an unsupervised method and verified on a public dataset. Then without extracting manual features, heatmaps are fed into a convolutional neural network (CNN) model directly for the WSI-level prediction. Our approach achieved an accuracy of 81.19% and a custom metric score of 0.9495 on the public cervical cancer WSI dataset, which is the highest in the public so far.