Deep learning combined with ball scale transform for circulating tumor cell enumeration in digital pathology

Leihui Tong; Yuan Wan

doi:10.1117/12.2654992

6 April 2023 Deep learning combined with ball scale transform for circulating tumor cell enumeration in digital pathology

Leihui Tong, Yuan Wan

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 12471, Medical Imaging 2023: Digital and Computational Pathology; 1247111 (2023) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2654992
Event: SPIE Medical Imaging, 2023, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

Circulating Tumor Cells, or CTCs, are cancerous cells that shed from a primary tumor and intravasate into the bloodstream. This type of screening, otherwise known as biopsy screening, is effective at determining the early stages of cancer and discussing treatment. Expert cytopathologists have been required to look at these images to screen for cancer. Anything between the numbers of hundreds to thousands of images must be gone through. At a heavy time cost and a basis of work effort, we thus proposed an idea using a U-Net to screen for these CTCs and enumerate them in a more efficient and time-costing method. The Ball-scale transform technique, a filter that allows us to determine the maximum sphericality in a thresholded homogeneity, was introduced into this field of digital pathology alongside our proposed novel deep learning-based (UNet) CTC detection and enumeration approach. We collected 466 images for CTC detection and another 198 images with 323 CTCs for testing CTC enumeration. We investigated two ways to use the Ball-scale image: using B-scale images in the input channel of deep learning and using B-scale images in the output layer by providing high-level information (size and shape) encoded in the B-scale image itself to do the enumeration. We also tested deep learning-based CTC detection by using different labels. Results show that our method is much better than those which utilize thresholding with a missing rate comparison of 0.04 to 0.30. Meanwhile, our method is certainly comparable and competitive with the results in recent publications and may facilitate other types of research.

Conference Presentation

Citation Download Citation

Leihui Tong and Yuan Wan "Deep learning combined with ball scale transform for circulating tumor cell enumeration in digital pathology", Proc. SPIE 12471, Medical Imaging 2023: Digital and Computational Pathology, 1247111 (6 April 2023); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2654992

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