Abstract:
Automated detection of lymph node metastasis (LNM) holds great potential to alleviate the workload of doctors and reduce misinterpretations. Despite the practical success...Show MoreMetadata
Abstract:
Automated detection of lymph node metastasis (LNM) holds great potential to alleviate the workload of doctors and reduce misinterpretations. Despite the practical successes achieved, effectively addressing the highly complex and heterogeneous tumor microenvironment remains an open and challenging problem, especially when tumor subtypes intermingle and are difficult to delineate. In this paper, we propose a multi-task adaptive resolution network, named MAR-Net, for LNM detection and subtyping in complex mixed-type cancers. Specifically, we construct a resolution-aware module to mine heterogeneous diagnostic information, which exploits the multi-scale pyramid information and adaptively combines multi-resolution structured features for comprehensive representation. Additionally, we adopt a multi-task learning approach that simultaneously addresses LNM detection and subtyping, reducing model instability during optimization and improving performance across both tasks. More importantly, to rectify the potential misclassification of tumor subtypes, we elaborately design a hierarchical subtying refinement (HSR) algorithm that leverages a generic segmentation model informed by pathologists' prior knowledge. Evaluations have been conducted on three private and one public cancer datasets (554 WSIs, 4.8 million patches). Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method consistently achieves superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art methods, achieving 0.5% to 3.2% higher AUC in LNM detection and 3.8% to 4.4% higher AUC in LNM subtyping.
Published in: IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics ( Volume: 29, Issue: 1, January 2025)
Funding Agency:
Cancer Hospital of Dalian University of Technology, School of Biomedical Engineering, Faulty of Medicine, and Key Laboratory of Integrated Circuit and Biomedical Electronic System, Liaoning Province, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China
Department of Pathology, Gangnam Severance Hospital, Yonsei University College of Medicine, Seoul, Republic of Korea
Cancer Hospital of Dalian University of Technology, School of Biomedical Engineering, Faulty of Medicine, and Key Laboratory of Integrated Circuit and Biomedical Electronic System, Liaoning Province, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China
School of Computer Science and Technology, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China
Department of Pathology, College of Basic Medical Sciences and First Affiliated Hospital of China Medical University, Shenyang, China
Cancer Hospital of Dalian University of Technology, School of Biomedical Engineering, Faulty of Medicine, and Key Laboratory of Integrated Circuit and Biomedical Electronic System, Liaoning Province, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China
Department of Surgery, Gangnam Severance Hospital, Yonsei University College of Medicine, Seoul, Republic of Korea
Cancer Hospital of Dalian University of Technology, School of Biomedical Engineering, Faulty of Medicine, and Key Laboratory of Integrated Circuit and Biomedical Electronic System, Liaoning Province, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China
Cancer Hospital of Dalian University of Technology, School of Biomedical Engineering, Faulty of Medicine, and Key Laboratory of Integrated Circuit and Biomedical Electronic System, Liaoning Province, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China
Department of Pathology, Gangnam Severance Hospital, Yonsei University College of Medicine, Seoul, Republic of Korea
Cancer Hospital of Dalian University of Technology, School of Biomedical Engineering, Faulty of Medicine, and Key Laboratory of Integrated Circuit and Biomedical Electronic System, Liaoning Province, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China
School of Computer Science and Technology, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China
Department of Pathology, College of Basic Medical Sciences and First Affiliated Hospital of China Medical University, Shenyang, China
Cancer Hospital of Dalian University of Technology, School of Biomedical Engineering, Faulty of Medicine, and Key Laboratory of Integrated Circuit and Biomedical Electronic System, Liaoning Province, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China
Department of Surgery, Gangnam Severance Hospital, Yonsei University College of Medicine, Seoul, Republic of Korea
Cancer Hospital of Dalian University of Technology, School of Biomedical Engineering, Faulty of Medicine, and Key Laboratory of Integrated Circuit and Biomedical Electronic System, Liaoning Province, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China