Nuclear Density Distribution Feature for Improving Cervical Histopathological Images Recognition

Cervical carcinoma is a common type of cancer in the female reproductive system. Early detection and diagnosis can facilitate immediate treatment and prevent progression of the disease. However, in order to achieve better performance, DL-based algorithms just stack various layers with low interpretability. In this paper, a robust and reliable Nuclear Density Distribution Feature (NDDF) based on priors of the pathologists to promote the Cervical Histopathological Image Classification (CHIC) is proposed. Our proposed method combines the nucleus mask segmented by U-Net with the segmentation grid-lines generated from pathology images utilizing SLIC to obtain the NDDF map, which contains information about the morphology, size, number, and spatial distribution of nuclei. The result shows that the proposed model trained with NDDF maps has better performance and accuracy than that trained on RGB images (patch-level histopathological images). More significantly, the accuracy of the two-stream network trained with RGB images and NDDF maps is steadily improved over the corresponding baselines of different complexity.