Efficient automated detection of mitotic cells from breast histological images using deep convolution neutral network with wavelet decomposed patches

Abstract In medical practice, the mitotic cell count from histological images acts as a proliferative marker for cancer diagnosis. Therefore, an accurate method for detecting mitotic cells in histological images is essential for cancer screening. Manual evaluation of clinically relevant image features that might reflect mitotic cells in histological images is time-consuming and error prone, due to the heterogeneous physical characteristics of mitotic cells. Computer-assisted automated detection of mitotic cells could overcome these limitations of manual analysis and act as a useful tool for pathologists to make cancer diagnoses efficiently and accurately. Here, we propose a new approach for mitotic cell detection in breast histological images that uses a deep convolution neural network (CNN) with wavelet decomposed image patches. In this approach, raw image patches of 81 × 81 pixels are decomposed to patches of 21 × 21 pixels using Haar wavelet and subsequently used in developing a deep CNN model for automated detection of mitotic cells. The decomposition step reduces convolution time for mitotic cell detection relative to the use of raw image patches in conventional CNN models. The proposed deep network was tested using the MITOS (ICPR2012) and MITOS-ATYPIA-14 breast cancer histological datasets and shown to outperform existing algorithms for mitotic cell detection. Overall, our method improves the performance and reduces the computational burden of conventional deep CNN approaches for mitotic cell detection.