Cervical Histopathology Image Classification Using Multilayer Hidden Conditional Random Fields and Weakly Supervised Learning

In this paper, a novel multilayer hidden conditional random fields (MHCRFs)-based cervical histopathology image classification (CHIC) model is proposed to classify well, moderate and poorly differentiation stages of cervical cancer using a weakly supervised learning strategy. First, the color, texture, and deep learning features are extracted to represent the histopathological image patches. Then, based on the extracted features, artificial neural network, support vector machine, and random forest classifiers are designed to calculate the patch-level classification probabilities. Third, effective classifiers are selected to generate unary and binary potentials. At last, using the generated potentials, the final image-level classification results are predicted by our MHCRF model, and an overall accuracy around 77.32% is obtained on six practical cervical histopathological image datasets with more than 600 immunohistochemical (IHC) stained samples. Among the six test accuracies, the highest reaches 88%. Furthermore, we also test our MHCRF method with a gastric hematoxylin-eosin (HE) stained histopathological image dataset including 200 images for an extended experiment, and achieve an accuracy of 93%.