A hybrid neural and statistical classifier system for histopathologic grading of prostatic lesions

Neural network and statistical classification methods were applied to derive an objective grading for moderately and poorly differentiated lesions of the prostate, based on characteristics of the nuclear placement patterns. A partly trained multilayer neural network was used as a feature extractor. A hybrid classifier system using a quadratic Bayesian classifier applied to these features allowed grade assignment consensus with visual diagnosis in 96% of fields from a training set of 500 fields and in 77% of 130 fields of a test set.