Classification of papillary thyroid carcinoma histological images based on deep learning

Papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC) is a common carcinoma in thyroid. As many benign thyroid nodules have the papillary structure which could easily be confused with PTC in morphology. Thus, pathologists have to take a lot of time on differential diagnosis of PTC besides personal diagnostic experience and there is no doubt that it is subjective and difficult to obtain consistency among observers. To address this issue, we applied deep learning to the differential diagnosis of PTC and proposed a histological image classification method for PTC based on the Inception Residual convolutional neural network (IRCNN) and support vector machine (SVM). First, in order to expand the dataset and solve the problem of histological image color inconsistency, a pre-processing module was constructed that included color transfer and mirror transform. Then, to alleviate overfitting of the deep learning model, we optimized the convolution neural network by combining Inception Network and Residual Network to extract image features. Finally, the SVM was trained via image features extracted by IRCNN to perform the classification task. Experimental results show effectiveness of the proposed method in the classification of PTC histological images.