A Multi-Classifier System for Automatic Mitosis Detection in Breast Histopathology Images Using Deep Belief Networks

Mitotic count is an important diagnostic factor in breast cancer grading and prognosis. Detection of mitosis in breast histopathology images is very challenging mainly due to diffused intensities along object boundary and shape variation in different stages of mitosis. This paper demonstrates an accurate technique for detecting the mitotic cells in Hematoxyline and Eosin stained images by step by step refinement of segmentation and classification stages. Krill Herd Algorithm-based localized active contour model precisely segments cell nuclei from background stroma. A deep belief network based multi-classifier system classifies the labeled cells into mitotic and nonmitotic groups. The proposed method has been evaluated on MITOS data set provided for MITOS-ATYPIA contest 2014 and also on clinical images obtained from Regional Cancer Centre (RCC), Thiruvananthapuram, which is a pioneer institute specifically for cancer diagnosis and research in India. The algorithm provides improved performance compared with other state–of–the-art techniques with average F-score of 84.29% for the MITOS data set and 75% for the clinical data set from RCC.