PseudoCell: Hard Negative Mining as Pseudo Labeling for Deep Learning-Based Centroblast Cell Detection

TL;DR

PseudoCell is an innovative deep learning framework that automates centroblast cell detection in whole-slide images, significantly reducing pathologists' workload by accurately pre-screening tissue areas without needing refined labels.

Contribution

It introduces PseudoCell, a novel object detection method combining pathologist labels with pseudo-negative labels from false-positive predictions, enhancing centroblast detection without requiring detailed manual annotations.

Findings

Reduces non-centroblast tissue areas by up to 99.35%.

Automates centroblast detection, decreasing pathologist workload.

Does not require refined labels for effective performance.

Abstract

Patch classification models based on deep learning have been utilized in whole-slide images (WSI) of H&E-stained tissue samples to assist pathologists in grading follicular lymphoma patients. However, these approaches still require pathologists to manually identify centroblast cells and provide refined labels for optimal performance. To address this, we propose PseudoCell, an object detection framework to automate centroblast detection in WSI (source code is available at https://github.com/IoBT-VISTEC/PseudoCell.git). This framework incorporates centroblast labels from pathologists and combines them with pseudo-negative labels obtained from undersampled false-positive predictions using the cell's morphological features. By employing PseudoCell, pathologists' workload can be reduced as it accurately narrows down the areas requiring their attention during examining tissue. Depending on the confidence threshold, PseudoCell can eliminate 58.18-99.35% of non-centroblasts tissue areas on WSI. This study presents a practical centroblast prescreening method that does not require pathologists' refined labels for improvement. Detailed guidance on the practical implementation of PseudoCell is provided in the discussion section.