Automatic Lymph Node Classification with Convolutional Neural Network

Manual lymph node classification is a tedious and time-consuming task. It requires a histopathologist to discriminate a lymph node from other look-alike kinds of tissues. The lymph node is easily misunderstood with other tissues because its shape and color might be similar to the others tissue around it. To automate this task, we present an automatic lymph node classification with convolutional neural network (CNN). In addition, we compared eight existing CNNs to ensure that we discover the best architecture for discriminating lymph node. DenseNet architecture provided the highest performance among AlexNet, VGG, GoogLeNet, ResNet, SqueezeNet, MobileNet, and EfficientNet, the highest accuracy at 0.994 and an F1score of 0.996. DenseNet accomplished the highest performance from two advantages: (i) fewer parameters and (ii) Dense connectivity.