Frontiers in Physiology (Jan 2024)

A novel dilated contextual attention module for breast cancer mitosis cell detection

  • Zhiqiang Li,
  • Xiangkui Li,
  • Weixuan Wu,
  • He Lyu,
  • Xuezhi Tang,
  • Chenchen Zhou,
  • Fanxin Xu,
  • Bin Luo,
  • Yulian Jiang,
  • Xingwen Liu,
  • Wei Xiang

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2024.1337554
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 15

Abstract

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Background and object: Mitotic count (MC) is a critical histological parameter for accurately assessing the degree of invasiveness in breast cancer, holding significant clinical value for cancer treatment and prognosis. However, accurately identifying mitotic cells poses a challenge due to their morphological and size diversity.Objective: We propose a novel end-to-end deep-learning method for identifying mitotic cells in breast cancer pathological images, with the aim of enhancing the performance of recognizing mitotic cells.Methods: We introduced the Dilated Cascading Network (DilCasNet) composed of detection and classification stages. To enhance the model’s ability to capture distant feature dependencies in mitotic cells, we devised a novel Dilated Contextual Attention Module (DiCoA) that utilizes sparse global attention during the detection. For reclassifying mitotic cell areas localized in the detection stage, we integrate the EfficientNet-B7 and VGG16 pre-trained models (InPreMo) in the classification step.Results: Based on the canine mammary carcinoma (CMC) mitosis dataset, DilCasNet demonstrates superior overall performance compared to the benchmark model. The specific metrics of the model’s performance are as follows: F1 score of 82.9%, Precision of 82.6%, and Recall of 83.2%. With the incorporation of the DiCoA attention module, the model exhibited an improvement of over 3.5% in the F1 during the detection stage.Conclusion: The DilCasNet achieved a favorable detection performance of mitotic cells in breast cancer and provides a solution for detecting mitotic cells in pathological images of other cancers.

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