Automated Detection of Mitotic Figures in Breast Cancer Histopathology Images Using Gabor Features and Deep Neural Networks

The count of mitotic figures in Breast cancer histopathology slides is the most significant independent prognostic factor enabling determination of the proliferative activity of the tumor. In spite of the strict protocols followed, the mitotic counting activity suffers from subjectivity and considerable amount of observer variability despite being a laborious task. Interest in automated detection of mitotic figures has been rekindled with the advent of Whole Slide Scanners. Subsequently mitotic detection grand challenge contests have been held in recent years and several research methodologies developed by their participants. This paper proposes an efficient mitotic detection methodology for Hematoxylin and Eosin stained Breast cancer Histopathology Images using Gabor features and a Deep Belief Network- Deep Neural Network architecture (DBN-DNN). The proposed method has been evaluated on breast histopathology images from the publicly available dataset from MITOS contest held at the ICPR 2012 conference. It contains 226 mitoses annotated on 35 HPFs by several pathologists and 15 testing HPFs, yielding an F-measure of 0.74. In addition the said methodology was also tested on 3 slides from the MITOSIS- ATYPIA grand challenge held at the ICPR 2014 conference, an extension of MITOS containing 749 mitoses annotated on 1200 HPFs, by pathologists worldwide. This study has employed 3 slides (294 HPFs) from the MITOS-ATYPIA training dataset in its evaluation and the results showed F-measures 0.65, 0.72and 0.74 for each slide. The proposed method is fast and computationally simple yet its accuracy and specificity is comparable to the best winning methods of the aforementioned grand challenges.