Deep Multi-Instance Learning Using Multi-Modal Data for Diagnosis of Lymphocytosis

We investigate the use of recent advances in deep learning and propose an end-to-end trainable multi-instance convolutional neural network within a mixture-of-experts formulation that combines information from two types of data-images and clinical attributes-for the diagnosis of lymphocytosis. The convolutional network learns to extract meaningful features from images of blood cells using an embedding level approach and aggregates them. Moreover, the mixture-of-experts model combines information from these images as well as clinical attributes to form an end-to-end trainable pipeline for diagnosis of lymphocytosis. Our results demonstrate that even the convolutional network by itself is able to discover meaningful associations between the images and the diagnosis, indicating the presence of important unexploited information in the images. The mixture-of-experts formulation is shown to be more robust while maintaining performance via. a repeatability study to assess the effect of variability in data acquisition on the predictions. The proposed methods are compared with different methods from literature based both on conventional handcrafted features and machine learning, and on recent deep learning models based on attention mechanisms. Our method reports a balanced accuracy of 85.41% and outperfroms the handcrafted feature-based and attention-based approaches as well that of biologists which scored 79.44%, 82.89% and 77.07% respectively. These results give insights on the potentials of the applicability of the proposed method in clinical practice. Our code and datasets can be found at https://github.com/msahasrabudhe/lymphoMIL.