An Efficient Lightweight CNN and Ensemble Machine Learning Classification of Prostate Tissue Using Multilevel Feature Analysis

Advancing Prostate Cancer Diagnosis: A Deep Learning Approach for Enhanced Detection in MRI Images

Prostate cancer remains a leading cause of mortality among men globally, necessitating advancements in diagnostic methodologies to improve detection and treatment outcomes. Magnetic Resonance Imaging has emerged as a crucial technique for the detection of prostate cancer, with current research focusing on the integration of deep learning frameworks to refine this diagnostic process. This study employs a comprehensive approach using multiple deep learning models, including a three-dimensional (3D) Convolutional Neural Network, a Residual Network, and an Inception Network to enhance the accuracy and robustness of prostate cancer detection. By leveraging the complementary strengths of these models through an ensemble method and soft voting technique, the study aims to achieve superior diagnostic performance. The proposed methodology demonstrates state-of-the-art results, with the ensemble model achieving an overall accuracy of 91.3%, a sensitivity of 90.2%, a specificity of 92.1%, a precision of 89.8%, and an F1 score of 90.0% when applied to MRI images from the SPIE-AAPM-NCI PROSTATEx dataset. Evaluation of the models involved meticulous pre-processing, data augmentation, and the use of advanced deep-learning architectures to analyze the whole MRI slices and volumes. The findings highlight the potential of using an ensemble approach to significantly improve prostate cancer diagnostics, offering a robust and precise tool for clinical applications.

A novel sequential structure for lightweight multi-scale feature learning under limited available images

Although multi-scale feature learning can improve the performances of deep models, its parallel structure quadratically increases the model parameters and causes deep models to become larger and larger when enlarging the receptive fields (RFs). This leads to deep models easily suffering from over-fitting issue in many practical applications where the available training samples are always insufficient or limited. In addition, under this limited situation, although lightweight models (with fewer model parameters) can effectively reduce over-fitting, they may suffer from under-fitting because of insufficient training data for effective feature learning. In this work, a lightweight model called Sequential Multi-scale Feature Learning Network (SMF-Net) is proposed to alleviate these two issues simultaneously using a novel sequential structure of multi-scale feature learning. Compared to both deep and lightweight models, the proposed sequential structure in SMF-Net can easily extract features with larger RFs for multi-scale feature learning only with a few and linearly increased model parameters. The experimental results on both classification and segmentation tasks demonstrate that our SMF-Net only has 1.25M model parameters (5.3% of Res2Net50) with 0.7G FLOPS (14.6% of Res2Net50) for classification and 1.54M parameters (8.9% of UNet) with 3.35G FLOPs (10.9% of UNet) for segmentation but achieves higher accuracy than SOTA deep models and lightweight models, even when the training data is very limited available.

Cluster Analysis of Cell Nuclei in H&E-Stained Histological Sections of Prostate Cancer and Classification Based on Traditional and Modern Artificial Intelligence Techniques

Biomarker identification is very important to differentiate the grade groups in the histopathological sections of prostate cancer (PCa). Assessing the cluster of cell nuclei is essential for pathological investigation. In this study, we present a computer-based method for cluster analyses of cell nuclei and performed traditional (i.e., unsupervised method) and modern (i.e., supervised method) artificial intelligence (AI) techniques for distinguishing the grade groups of PCa. Two datasets on PCa were collected to carry out this research. Histopathology samples were obtained from whole slides stained with hematoxylin and eosin (H&E). In this research, state-of-the-art approaches were proposed for color normalization, cell nuclei segmentation, feature selection, and classification. A traditional minimum spanning tree (MST) algorithm was employed to identify the clusters and better capture the proliferation and community structure of cell nuclei. K-medoids clustering and stacked ensemble machine learning (ML) approaches were used to perform traditional and modern AI-based classification. The binary and multiclass classification was derived to compare the model quality and results between the grades of PCa. Furthermore, a comparative analysis was carried out between traditional and modern AI techniques using different performance metrics (i.e., statistical parameters). Cluster features of the cell nuclei can be useful information for cancer grading. However, further validation of cluster analysis is required to accomplish astounding classification results.