A Two-Branch Neural Network for Non-Small-Cell Lung Cancer Classification and Segmentation

Immunotherapy has great potential in the treatment of Non-Small-Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC). The treatment decision for patients is based on the pathologist’s analysis of NSCLC biopsy images. Using deep learning (DL) methods to automatically segment and classify tissues enable quantitative analysis of biopsy images. However, distinguishing between positive tumor tissues and immune tissues remains challenging due to the similarity between these two types of tissues. In this paper, we present a two-branch convolutional neural network (TBNet) combining segmentation network and patch-based classification network. The segmentation branch feeds additional information to the classification branch to improve the performance of patch classification. Then the classification results are fed back to the segmentation branch to obtain segmented tissue regions classified as positive tumor or immune. The experimental results show that the proposed method improves the classification accuracy by an average of 4.3% over a single classification model and achieves 0.864 and 0.907 dice coefficient of positive tumor tissue region and immune tissue region in segmentation task.