Deep Active Learning Framework for Lymph Node Metastasis Prediction in Medical Support System

Assessing the extent of cancer spread by histopathological analysis of sentinel axillary lymph nodes is an important part of breast cancer staging. With the maturity and prevalence of deep learning technology, building auxiliary medical systems can help to relieve the burden of pathologists and increase the diagnostic precision and accuracy during this process. However, such histopathological images have complex patterns that are difficult for ordinary people to understand and require professional medical practitioners to annotate. This increases the cost of constructing such medical systems. To reduce the cost of annotating and improve the performance of the model as much as possible, in other words, using as few labeled samples as possible to obtain a greater performance improvement, we propose a deep learning framework with a three-stage query strategy and novel model update strategy. The framework first trains an auto-encoder with all the samples to obtain a global representation in a low-dimensional space. In the query stage, the unlabeled samples are first selected according to uncertainty, and then, coreset-based methods are employed to reduce sample redundancy. Finally, distribution differences between labeled samples and unlabeled samples are evaluated and samples that can quickly eliminate the distribution differences are selected. This method achieves faster iterative efficiency than the uncertainty strategies, representative strategies, or hybrid strategies on the lymph node slice dataset and other commonly used datasets. It reaches the performance of training with all data, but only uses 50% of the labeled. During the model update process, we randomly freeze some weights and only train the task model on new labeled samples with a smaller learning rate. Compared with fine-tuning task model on new samples, large-scale performance degradation is avoided. Compared with the retraining strategy or the replay strategy, it reduces the training cost of updating the task model by 79.87% and 90.07%, respectively.