Combining Radiology and Pathology for Automatic Glioma Classification

Subtype classification is critical in the treatment of gliomas because different subtypes lead to different treatment options and postoperative care. Although many radiological- or histological-based glioma classification algorithms have been developed, most of them focus on single-modality data. In this paper, we propose an innovative two-stage model to classify gliomas into three subtypes (i.e., glioblastoma, oligodendroglioma, and astrocytoma) based on radiology and histology data. In the first stage, our model classifies each image as having glioblastoma or not. Based on the obtained non-glioblastoma images, the second stage aims to accurately distinguish astrocytoma and oligodendroglioma. The radiological images and histological images pass through the two-stage design with 3D and 2D models, respectively. Then, an ensemble classification network is designed to automatically integrate the features of the two modalities. We have verified our method by participating in the MICCAI 2020 CPM-RadPath Challenge and won 1st place. Our proposed model achieves high performance on the validation set with a balanced accuracy of 0.889, Cohen’s Kappa of 0.903, and an F1-score of 0.943. Our model could advance multimodal-based glioma research and provide assistance to pathologists and neurologists in diagnosing glioma subtypes. The code has been publicly available online at https://github.com/Xiyue-Wang/1st-in-MICCAI2020-CPM.