A novel dataset and efficient deep learning framework for automated grading of renal cell carcinoma from kidney histopathology images

Trends of kidney cancer cases worldwide are expected to increase persistently and this inspires the modification of the traditional diagnosis system to respond to future challenges. Renal Cell Carcinoma (RCC) is the most common kidney cancer and responsible for 80–85% of all renal tumors. This study proposed a robust and computationally efficient fully automated Renal Cell Carcinoma Grading Network (RCCGNet) from kidney histopathology images. The proposed RCCGNet contains a shared channel residual (SCR) block which allows the network to learn feature maps associated with different versions of the input with two parallel paths. The SCR block shares the information between two different layers and operates the shared data separately by providing beneficial supplements to each other. As a part of this study, we also introduced a new dataset for the grading of RCC with five different grades. We obtained 722 Hematoxylin & Eosin (H &E) stained slides of different patients and associated grades from the Department of Pathology, Kasturba Medical College (KMC), Mangalore, India. We performed comparable experiments which include deep learning models trained from scratch as well as transfer learning techniques using pre-trained weights of the ImageNet. To show the proposed model is generalized and independent of the dataset, we experimented with one additional well-established data called BreakHis dataset for eight class-classification. The experimental result shows that proposed RCCGNet is superior in comparison with the eight most recent classification methods on the proposed dataset as well as BreakHis dataset in terms of prediction accuracy and computational complexity.