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[Automatic classification of immune-mediated glomerular diseases based on multi-modal multi-instance learning]
1School of Biomedical Engineering//Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Medical Image Processing//Guangdong Provincial Engineering Laboratory for Medical Imaging and Diagnostic Technology, Southern Medical University, Guangzhou 510515, China.
Objective:
To develop a multi-modal deep learning method for automatic classification of immune-mediated glomerular diseases based on images of optical microscopy (OM), immunofluorescence microscopy (IM), and transmission electron microscopy (TEM).
Methods:
We retrospectively collected the pathological images from 273 patients and constructed a multi-modal multi- instance model for classification of 3 immune-mediated glomerular diseases, namely immunoglobulin A nephropathy (IgAN), membranous nephropathy (MN), and lupus nephritis (LN). This model adopts an instance-level multi-instance learning (I-MIL) method to select the TEM images for multi-modal feature fusion with the OM images and IM images of the same patient. By comparing this model with unimodal and bimodal models, we explored different combinations of the 3 modalities and the optimal methods for modal feature fusion.
Results:
The multi-modal multi-instance model combining OM, IM, and TEM images had a disease classification accuracy of (88.34±2.12)%, superior to that of the optimal unimodal model [(87.08±4.25)%] and that of the optimal bimodal model [(87.92±3.06)%].
Conclusion:
This multi- modal multi- instance model based on OM, IM, and TEM images can achieve automatic classification of immune-mediated glomerular diseases with a good classification accuracy.
