Colorectal cancer classification using weakly annotated whole slide images: Multiple instance learning optimization...

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is considered one of the most deadly cancer types nowadays. It is rapidly increasing due to many factors, such as unhealthy lifestyles, water and food pollution, aging, and medical diagnosis development. Detecting CRC in its early stages can help stop its growth by providing the necessary treatments, thereby saving many people's lives. There are various tests that doctors can perform to diagnose CRC; however, biopsy using histopathological images is considered the "gold standard" for CRC diagnosis. Deep learning techniques can now be leveraged to build computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems that can affirm if an input sample shows any symptoms of cancer and determine its stage and location with an acceptable degree of confidence. In this research, we utilize deep learning to study the CRC classification problem using weakly annotated histopathological whole slide images (WSIs). We relax the constraints of the multiple instance learning (MIL) algorithm and primarily propose WSI-label prediction functions to be integrated with MIL, which significantly enhances the performance of WSI-level classification. We also applied efficient preprocessing techniques that output a computationally power-efficient dataset representation and performed multiple experiments to compose the most efficient CAD system. Our study introduces a notable improvement over the results obtained by the baseline research where we achieved an accuracy of 93.05% compared to 84.17%. Furthermore, our results using only the weakly annotated WSIs outperformed the baseline results that are based on performing initial pre-training using a strongly annotated part of the dataset.