Deep Learning Model based Ki-67 Index estimation with Automatically Labelled Data

Abstract

Ki-67 labelling index is a biomarker which is used across the world to predict the aggressiveness of cancer. To compute the Ki-67 index, pathologists normally count the tumour nuclei from the slide images manually; hence it is timeconsuming and is subject to inter pathologist variability. With the development of image processing and machine learning, many methods have been introduced for automatic Ki-67 estimation. But most of them require manual annotations and are restricted to one type of cancer. In this work, we propose a pooled Otsu's method to generate labels and train a semantic segmentation deep neural network (DNN). The output is postprocessed to find the Ki-67 index. Evaluation of two different types of cancer (bladder and breast cancer) results in a mean absolute error of 3.52%. The performance of the DNN trained with automatic labels is better than DNN trained with ground truth by an absolute value of 1.25%. © 2020 IEEE.