LAD-GCN: Automatic diagnostic framework for quantitative estimation of growth patterns during clinical evaluation of...

Quantitative estimation of growth patterns is important for diagnosis of lung adenocarcinoma and prediction of prognosis. However, the growth patterns of lung adenocarcinoma tissue are very dependent on the spatial organization of cells. Deep learning for lung tumor histopathological image analysis often uses convolutional neural networks to automatically extract features, ignoring this spatial relationship. In this paper, a novel fully automated framework is proposed for growth pattern evaluation in lung adenocarcinoma. Specifically, the proposed method uses graph convolutional networks to extract cell structural features; that is, cells are extracted and graph structures are constructed based on histopathological image data without graph structure. A deep neural network is then used to extract the global semantic features of histopathological images to complement the cell structural features obtained in the previous step. Finally, the structural features and semantic features are fused to achieve growth pattern prediction. Experimental studies on several datasets validate our design, demonstrating that methods based on the spatial organization of cells are appropriate for the analysis of growth patterns.