Identify glomeruli in human kidney tissue images using a deep learning approach

Global attention based GNN with Bayesian collaborative learning for glomerular lesion recognition

BACKGROUND

Glomerular lesions reflect the onset and progression of renal disease. Pathological diagnoses are widely regarded as the definitive method for recognizing these lesions, as the deviations in histopathological structures closely correlate with impairments in renal function.

METHODS

Deep learning plays a crucial role in streamlining the laborious, challenging, and subjective task of recognizing glomerular lesions by pathologists. However, the current methods treat pathology images as data in regular Euclidean space, limiting their ability to efficiently represent the complex local features and global connections. In response to this challenge, this paper proposes a graph neural network (GNN) that utilizes global attention pooling (GAP) to more effectively extract high-level semantic features from glomerular images. The model incorporates Bayesian collaborative learning (BCL), enhancing node feature fine-tuning and fusion during training. In addition, this paper adds a soft classification head to mitigate the semantic ambiguity associated with a purely hard classification.

RESULTS

This paper conducted extensive experiments on four glomerular datasets, comprising a total of 491 whole slide images (WSIs) and 9030 images. The results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves impressive F1 scores of 81.37%, 90.12%, 87.72%, and 98.68% on four private datasets for glomerular lesion recognition. These scores surpass the performance of the other models used for comparison. Furthermore, this paper employed a publicly available BReAst Carcinoma Subtyping (BRACS) dataset with an 85.61% F1 score to further prove the superiority of the proposed model.

CONCLUSION

The proposed model not only facilitates precise recognition of glomerular lesions but also serves as a potent tool for diagnosing kidney diseases effectively. Furthermore, the framework and training methodology of the GNN can be adeptly applied to address various pathology image classification challenges.

Artificial intelligence in the healthcare sector: comparison of deep learning networks using chest X-ray images

Purpose

Artificial intelligence has led to significant developments in the healthcare sector, as in other sectors and fields. In light of its significance, the present study delves into exploring deep learning, a branch of artificial intelligence.

Methods

In the study, deep learning networks ResNet101, AlexNet, GoogLeNet, and Xception were considered, and it was aimed to determine the success of these networks in disease diagnosis. For this purpose, a dataset of 1,680 chest X-ray images was utilized, consisting of cases of COVID-19, viral pneumonia, and individuals without these diseases. These images were obtained by employing a rotation method to generate replicated data, wherein a split of 70 and 30% was adopted for training and validation, respectively.

Results

The analysis findings revealed that the deep learning networks were successful in classifying COVID-19, Viral Pneumonia, and Normal (disease-free) images. Moreover, an examination of the success levels revealed that the ResNet101 deep learning network was more successful than the others with a 96.32% success rate.

Conclusion

In the study, it was seen that deep learning can be used in disease diagnosis and can help experts in the relevant field, ultimately contributing to healthcare organizations and the practices of country managers.

Automatic Identification of Glomerular in Whole-Slide Images Using a Modified UNet Model

Glomeruli are interconnected capillaries in the renal cortex that are responsible for blood filtration. Damage to these glomeruli often signifies the presence of kidney disorders like glomerulonephritis and glomerulosclerosis, which can ultimately lead to chronic kidney disease and kidney failure. The timely detection of such conditions is essential for effective treatment. This paper proposes a modified UNet model to accurately detect glomeruli in whole-slide images of kidney tissue. The UNet model was modified by changing the number of filters and feature map dimensions from the first to the last layer to enhance the model's capacity for feature extraction. Moreover, the depth of the UNet model was also improved by adding one more convolution block to both the encoder and decoder sections. The dataset used in the study comprised 20 large whole-side images. Due to their large size, the images were cropped into 512 × 512-pixel patches, resulting in a dataset comprising 50,486 images. The proposed model performed well, with 95.7% accuracy, 97.2% precision, 96.4% recall, and 96.7% F1-score. These results demonstrate the proposed model's superior performance compared to the original UNet model, the UNet model with EfficientNetb3, and the current state-of-the-art. Based on these experimental findings, it has been determined that the proposed model accurately identifies glomeruli in extracted kidney patches.

Kidney Cancer Diagnosis and Surgery Selection by Machine Learning from CT Scans Combined with Clinical Metadata

Kidney cancers are one of the most common malignancies worldwide. Accurate diagnosis is a critical step in the management of kidney cancer patients and is influenced by multiple factors including tumor size or volume, cancer types and stages, etc. For malignant tumors, partial or radical surgery of the kidney might be required, but for clinicians, the basis for making this decision is often unclear. Partial nephrectomy could result in patient death due to cancer if kidney removal was necessary, whereas radical nephrectomy in less severe cases could resign patients to lifelong dialysis or need for future transplantation without sufficient cause. Using machine learning to consider clinical data alongside computed tomography images could potentially help resolve some of these surgical ambiguities, by enabling a more robust classification of kidney cancers and selection of optimal surgical approaches. In this study, we used the publicly available KiTS dataset of contrast-enhanced CT images and corresponding patient metadata to differentiate four major classes of kidney cancer: clear cell (ccRCC), chromophobe (chRCC), papillary (pRCC) renal cell carcinoma, and oncocytoma (ONC). We rationalized these data to overcome the high field of view (FoV), extract tumor regions of interest (ROIs), classify patients using deep machine-learning models, and extract/post-process CT image features for combination with clinical data. Regardless of marked data imbalance, our combined approach achieved a high level of performance (85.66% accuracy, 84.18% precision, 85.66% recall, and 84.92% F1-score). When selecting surgical procedures for malignant tumors (RCC), our method proved even more reliable (90.63% accuracy, 90.83% precision, 90.61% recall, and 90.50% F1-score). Using feature ranking, we confirmed that tumor volume and cancer stage are the most relevant clinical features for predicting surgical procedures. Once fully mature, the approach we propose could be used to assist surgeons in performing nephrectomies by guiding the choices of optimal procedures in individual patients with kidney cancer.

Deep-learning-based ensemble method for fully automated detection of renal masses on magnetic resonance images

Purpose

Accurate detection of small renal masses (SRM) is a fundamental step for automated classification of benign and malignant or indolent and aggressive renal tumors. Magnetic resonance image (MRI) may outperform computed tomography (CT) for SRM subtype differentiation due to improved tissue characterization, but is less explored compared to CT. The objective of this study is to autonomously detect SRM on contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance images (CE-MRI).

Approach

In this paper, we described a novel, fully automated methodology for accurate detection and localization of SRM on CE-MRI. We first determine the kidney boundaries using a U-Net convolutional neural network. We then search for SRM within the localized kidney regions using a mixture-of-experts ensemble model based on the U-Net architecture. Our dataset contained CE-MRI scans of 118 patients with different solid kidney tumor subtypes including renal cell carcinomas, oncocytomas, and fat-poor renal angiomyolipoma. We evaluated the proposed model on the entire CE-MRI dataset using 5-fold cross validation.

Results

The developed algorithm reported a Dice similarity coefficient of 91.20 ± 5.41 % (mean ± standard deviation) for kidney segmentation from 118 volumes consisting of 25,025 slices. Our proposed ensemble model for SRM detection yielded a recall and precision of 86.2% and 83.3% on the entire CE-MRI dataset, respectively.

Conclusions

We described a deep-learning-based method for fully automated SRM detection using CE-MR images, which has not been studied previously. The results are clinically important as SRM localization is a pre-step for fully automated diagnosis of SRM subtypes.

Development and Validation of a Nomogram to Predict Cancer-Specific Survival for Middle-Aged Patients With Early-Stage Hepatocellular Carcinoma

Background

Hepatocellular carcinoma is a common cause of death in middle-aged patients. We aimed to construct a new nomogram to predict cancer-specific survival (CSS) in middle-aged patients with hepatocellular carcinoma at an early stage.

Method

We collected clinicopathological information on early middle-aged patients with hepatocellular carcinoma from the SEER database. Univariate and multivariate Cox regression models were used to screen the independent risk factors for prognosis. These risk factors were used to construct predictions of CSS in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma. Consistency index (C- index), calibration curve, area under the receiver operating curve (AUC) were used. A decision analysis curve (DCA) was used to evaluate the clinical utility of the predictive model.

Results

A total of 6,286 patients with hepatocellular carcinoma in early middle age were enrolled. Univariate and multivariate Cox regression analysis showed that sex, marriage, race, histological tumor grade, T stage, surgery, chemotherapy, AFP, and tumor size were independent risk factors for prognosis. All independent risk factors were included in the nomogram to predict CSS at 1-, 3-, and 5-years in early middle age patients with hepatocellular carcinoma. In the training cohort and validation cohort, the C-index of the prediction model was 0.728 (95%CI: 0.716–0.740) and 0.733 (95%CI: 0.715–0.751), respectively. The calibration curve showed that the predicted value of the prediction model is highly consistent with the observed value. AUC also suggested that the model has good discrimination. DCA suggested that the nomogram had better predictive power than T staging.

Conclusion

We constructed a new nomogram to predict CSS in middle-aged patients with early-stage hepatocellular carcinoma. This prediction model has good accuracy and reliability, which can help patients and doctors to judge prognosis and make clinical decisions.

Usability and Security Testing of Online Links: A Framework for Click-Through Rate Prediction Using Deep Learning

The user, usage, and usability (3U’s) are three principal constituents for cyber security. The effective analysis of the 3U data using artificial intelligence (AI) techniques allows to deduce valuable observations, which allow domain experts to design practical strategies to alleviate cyberattacks and ensure decision support. Many internet applications, such as internet advertising and recommendation systems, rely on click-through rate (CTR) prediction to anticipate the possibility that a user would click on an ad or product, which is key for understanding human online behaviour. However, online systems are prone to click on fraud attacks. We propose a Human-Centric Cyber Security (HCCS) model that additionally includes AI techniques targeted at the key elements of user, usage, and usability. As a case study, we analyse a CTR prediction task, using deep learning methods (factorization machines) to predict online fraud through clickbait. The results of experiments on a real-world benchmark Avazu dataset show that the proposed approach outpaces (AUC is 0.8062) other CTR forecasting approaches, demonstrating the viability of the proposed framework.

S, Hasan MK, Saeed RA, Alsuhibany SA, Abdel-Khalek S. An Empirical Model to Predict the Diabetic Positive Using Stacked Ensemble Approach

Today, disease detection automation is widespread in healthcare systems. The diabetic disease is a significant problem that has spread widely all over the world. It is a genetic disease that causes trouble for human life throughout the lifespan. Every year the number of people with diabetes rises by millions, and this affects children too. The disease identification involves manual checking so far, and automation is a current trend in the medical field. Existing methods use a single algorithm for the prediction of diabetes. For complex problems, a single model is not enough because it may not be suitable for the input data or the parameters used in the approach. To solve complex problems, multiple algorithms are used. These multiple algorithms follow a homogeneous model or heterogeneous model. The homogeneous model means the same algorithm, but the model has been used multiple times. In the heterogeneous model, different algorithms are used. This paper adopts a heterogeneous ensemble model called the stacked ensemble model to predict whether a person has diabetes positively or negatively. This stacked ensemble model is advantageous in the prediction. Compared to other existing models such as logistic regression Naïve Bayes (72), (74.4), and LDA (81%), the proposed stacked ensemble model has achieved 93.1% accuracy in predicting blood sugar disease.

The use of Big Data Analytics in healthcare

The introduction of Big Data Analytics (BDA) in healthcare will allow to use new technologies both in treatment of patients and health management. The paper aims at analyzing the possibilities of using Big Data Analytics in healthcare. The research is based on a critical analysis of the literature, as well as the presentation of selected results of direct research on the use of Big Data Analytics in medical facilities. The direct research was carried out based on research questionnaire and conducted on a sample of 217 medical facilities in Poland. Literature studies have shown that the use of Big Data Analytics can bring many benefits to medical facilities, while direct research has shown that medical facilities in Poland are moving towards data-based healthcare because they use structured and unstructured data, reach for analytics in the administrative, business and clinical area. The research positively confirmed that medical facilities are working on both structural data and unstructured data. The following kinds and sources of data can be distinguished: from databases, transaction data, unstructured content of emails and documents, data from devices and sensors. However, the use of data from social media is lower as in their activity they reach for analytics, not only in the administrative and business but also in the clinical area. It clearly shows that the decisions made in medical facilities are highly data-driven. The results of the study confirm what has been analyzed in the literature that medical facilities are moving towards data-based healthcare, together with its benefits.