A Deep learning approach for Pan-Renal Cell Carcinoma classification and survival prediction from histopathology images

ABSTRACT Histopathological images contain morphological markers of disease progression that have diagnostic and predictive values. However, complex morphological information remains unutilized in unaided approach to histopathology. In this study, we demonstrate how deep learning framework can be used for an automatic classification of Renal Cell Carcinoma (RCC) subtypes, and for identification of features that predict survival outcome from digital histopathological images. Convolutional neural networks (CNN’s) trained on whole-slide images distinguish clear cell and chromophobe RCC from normal tissue with a classification accuracy of 93.39 % and 87.34 %, respectively. Further, a CNN trained to distinguish clear cell, chromophobe and papillary RCC achieves a classification accuracy of 92.61 %. Here, we introduced a novel support vector machine based method to deal with data imbalance in multi-class classification to improve the accuracy. Finally, we extracted the morphological features from high probability tumor regions identified by the CNN to predict patient survival outcome of most common clear cell RCC. The generated risk index based on both tumor shape and nuclei features are significantly associated with patient survival outcome. These results highlight that deep learning can play a role in both cancer diagnosis and prognosis.