A histopathological image classification method for cholangiocarcinoma based on spatial-channel feature fusion convolution neural network

Front Oncol. 2023 Aug 18:13:1237816. doi: 10.3389/fonc.2023.1237816. eCollection 2023.

Abstract

Histopathological image analysis plays an important role in the diagnosis and treatment of cholangiocarcinoma. This time-consuming and complex process is currently performed manually by pathologists. To reduce the burden on pathologists, this paper proposes a histopathological image classification method for cholangiocarcinoma based on spatial-channel feature fusion convolutional neural networks. Specifically, the proposed model consists of a spatial branch and a channel branch. In the spatial branch, residual structural blocks are used to extract deep spatial features. In the channel branch, a multi-scale feature extraction module and some multi-level feature extraction modules are designed to extract channel features in order to increase the representational ability of the model. The experimental results of the Multidimensional Choledoch Database show that the proposed method performs better than other classical CNN classification methods.

Keywords: cholangiocarcinoma; convolution neural network; feature fusion; feature reuse; histopathological image classification; multiscale.

Grants and funding

This research is supported by Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (BK20211201), the Open Research Fund of Key Laboratory of River Basin Digital Twinning of Ministry of Water Resources (Z0202042022), the Open Foundation of Industrial Perception and Intelligent Manufacturing Equipment Engineering Research Center of Jiangsu Province (ZK22-05-13), the school research fund of Nanjing Vocational University of Industry Technology (YK21-05-05), and the vocational undergraduate education research fund of Nanjing Vocational University of Industry Technology (ZBYB22-07).