Fast Pre-Diagnosis of Neoplastic Changes in Cytology Images Using Machine Learning

Abstract

We present the experiment results to use the YOLOv3 neural network architecture to automatically detect tumor cells in cytological samples taken from the skin in canines. A rich dataset of 1219 smeared sample images with 28,149 objects was gathered and annotated by the vet doctor to perform the experiments. It covers three types of common round cell neoplasms: mastocytoma, histiocytoma, and lymphoma. The dataset has been thoroughly described in the paper and is publicly available. The YOLOv3 neural network architecture was trained using various schemes involving original dataset modification and the different model parameters. The experiments showed that the prototype model achieved 0.7416 mAP, which outperforms the state-of-the-art machine learning and human estimated results. We also provided a series of analyses that may facilitate ML-based solutions by casting more light on some aspects of its performance. We also presented the main discrepancies between ML-based and human-based diagnoses. This outline may help depict the scenarios and how the automated tools may support the diagnosis process.

Keywords

• canines
• neoplasms
• detection
• deep learning
• YOLOv3