Diagnosis of Histopathological Images to Distinguish Types of Malignant Lymphomas Using Hybrid Techniques Based on Fusion Features

Abstract

Malignant lymphoma is one of the types of malignant tumors that can lead to death. The diagnostic method for identifying malignant lymphoma is a histopathological analysis of lymphoma tissue images. Because of the similar morphological characteristics of the lymphoma types, it is difficult for doctors and specialists to manually distinguish the types of lymphomas. Therefore, deep and automated learning techniques aim to solve this problem and help clinicians reconsider their diagnostic decisions. Because of the similarity of the morphological characteristics between lymphoma types, this study aimed to extract features using various algorithms and deep learning models and combine them together into feature vectors. Two datasets have been applied, each with two different systems for the reliable diagnosis of malignant lymphoma. The first system was a hybrid system between DenseNet-121 and ResNet-50 to extract deep features and reduce their dimensions by the principal component analysis (PCA) method, using the support vector machine (SVM) algorithm for classifying low-dimensional deep features. The second system was based on extracting the features using DenseNet-121 and ResNet-50 and combining them with the hand-crafted features extracted by gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM), fuzzy color histogram (FCH), discrete wavelet transform (DWT), and local binary pattern (LBP) algorithms and classifying them using a feed-forward neural network (FFNN) classifier. All systems achieved superior results in diagnosing the two datasets of malignant lymphomas. An FFNN classifier with features of ResNet-50 and hand-crafted features reached an accuracy of 99.5%, specificity of 100%, sensitivity of 99.33%, and AUC of 99.86% for the first dataset. In contrast, the same technique reached 100% for all measures to diagnose the second dataset.