Ensembling EfficientNets for the Classification and Interpretation of Histopathology Images

Abstract

The extended utilization of digitized Whole Slide Images is transforming the workflow of traditional clinical histopathology to the digital era. The ongoing transformation has demonstrated major potentials towards the exploitation of Machine Learning and Deep Learning techniques as assistive tools for specialized medical personnel. While the performance of the implemented algorithms is continually boosted by the mass production of generated Whole Slide Images and the development of state-of the-art deep convolutional architectures, ensemble models provide an additional methodology towards the improvement of the prediction accuracy. Despite the earlier belief related to deep convolutional networks being treated as black boxes, important steps for the interpretation of such predictive models have also been proposed recently. However, this trend is not fully unveiled for the ensemble models. The paper investigates the application of an explanation scheme for ensemble classifiers, while providing satisfactory classification results of histopathology breast and colon cancer images in terms of accuracy. The results can be interpreted by the hidden layers’ activation of the included subnetworks and provide more accurate results than single network implementations.