PartMitosis: A Partially Supervised Deep Learning Framework for Mitosis Detection in Breast Cancer Histopathology Images

Detection of mitotic tumor cells per tissue area is one of the critical markers of breast cancer prognosis. The aim of this paper is to develop a method for the automatic detection of mitotic figures from breast cancer histological slides using a partially supervised deep learning framework. Unlike the previous literature, which has focused on solving the problem of mitosis detection in the weakly annotated datasets using centroid pixel labels (weak labels) only without taking advantage of the available pixel-level labels (strong labels) of other datasets, in this paper, we design a novel partially supervised framework based on two parallel deep fully convolutional networks. One of them is trained using weak labels and the other is trained using strong labels, together with a weight transfer function. In the detection phase, we fuse the segmentation maps produced by the two networks to obtain the final mitosis detections. Our system exploits the available large sets of mitosis detection samples with mitosis centroid annotation, such as the 2014 ICPR dataset and the AMIDA13 dataset, and only a small set of samples with the annotation of all mitosis pixels, such as the 2012 ICPR dataset, to perform a more accurate mitosis detection on weakly labeled data. This enables us to outperform all previous mitosis detection systems by achieving F-scores of 0.575 and 0.698 on the 2014 ICPR dataset and the AMIDA13 dataset respectively.