Classification of lung cancer histology images using patch-level summary statistics

There are two main types of lung cancer: small cell lung cancer (SCLC) and non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), which are grouped accordingly due to similarity in behaviour and response to treatment. The main types of NSCLC are lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD), which accounts for about 40% of all lung cancers and lung squamous cell carcinoma (LUSC), which accounts for about 25-30% of all lung cancers. Due to their differences, automated classification of these two main subtypes of NSCLC is a critical step in developing a computer aided diagnostic system. We present an automated method for NSCLC classification, that consists of a two-part approach. Firstly, we implement a deep learning framework to classify input patches as LUAD, LUSC or non-diagnostic (ND). Next, we extract a collection of statistical and morphological measurements from the labeled whole-slide image (WSI) and use a random forest regression model to classify each WSI as lung adenocarcinoma or lung squamous cell carcinoma. This task is part of the Computational Precision Medicine challenge at the MICCAI 2017 conference, where we achieved the greatest classification accuracy with a score of 0.81.