Combination of Deep and Statistical Features of the Tissue of Pathology Images to Classify and Diagnose the Degree of Malignancy of Prostate Cancer

J Imaging Inform Med. 2024 Dec 11. doi: 10.1007/s10278-024-01363-9. Online ahead of print.

Abstract

Prostate cancer is one of the most prevalent male-specific diseases, where early and accurate diagnosis is essential for effective treatment and preventing disease progression. Assessing disease severity involves analyzing histological tissue samples, which are graded from 1 (healthy) to 5 (severely malignant) based on pathological features. However, traditional manual grading is labor-intensive and prone to variability. This study addresses the challenge of automating prostate cancer classification by proposing a novel histological grade analysis approach. The method integrates the gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) for extracting texture features with Haar wavelet modification to enhance feature quality. A convolutional neural network (CNN) is then employed for robust classification. The proposed method was evaluated using statistical and performance metrics, achieving an average accuracy of 97.3%, a precision of 98%, and an AUC of 0.95. These results underscore the effectiveness of the approach in accurately categorizing prostate tissue grades. This study demonstrates the potential of automated classification methods to support pathologists, enhance diagnostic precision, and improve clinical outcomes in prostate cancer care.

Keywords: Cancer detection; Classification; Deep learning; Medical image analysis; Prostate cancer; Texture features; Tissue statistical features.