Development and evaluation of deep neural networks for the classification of subtypes of renal cell carcinoma from kidney histopathology images

Abstract

Kidney cancer is a leading cause of cancer-related mortality, with renal cell carcinoma (RCC) being the most prevalent form, accounting for 80–85% of all renal tumors. Traditional diagnosis of kidney cancer requires manual examination and analysis of histopathology images, which is time-consuming, error-prone, and depends on the pathologist’s expertise. Recently, deep learning algorithms have gained significant attention in histopathology image analysis. In this study, we developed an efficient and robust deep learning architecture called RenalNet for the classification of subtypes of RCC from kidney histopathology images. The RenalNet is designed to capture cross-channel and inter-spatial features at three different scales simultaneously and combine them together. Cross-channel features refer to the relationships and dependencies between different data channels, while inter-spatial features refer to patterns within small spatial regions. The architecture contains a CNN module called multiple channel residual transformation (MCRT), to focus on the most relevant morphological features of RCC by fusing the information from multiple paths. Further, to improve the network’s representation power, a CNN module called Group Convolutional Deep Localization (GCDL) has been introduced, which effectively integrates three different feature descriptors. As a part of this study, we also introduced a novel benchmark dataset for the classification of subtypes of RCC from kidney histopathology images. We obtained digital hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) stained WSIs from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and acquired region of interest (ROIs) under the supervision of experienced pathologists resulted in the creation of patches. To demonstrate that the proposed model is generalized and independent of the dataset, it has experimented on three well-known datasets. Compared to the best-performing state-of-the-art model, RenalNet achieves accuracies of 91.67%, 97.14%, and 97.24% on three different datasets. Additionally, the proposed method significantly reduces the number of parameters and FLOPs, demonstrating computationally efficient with 2.71 × FLOPs & 0.2131 × parameters. © The Author(s) 2025.