MB-AI-His: Histopathological Diagnosis of Pediatric Medulloblastoma and its Subtypes via AI

Abstract

Medulloblastoma (MB) is a dangerous malignant pediatric brain tumor that could lead to death. It is considered the most common pediatric cancerous brain tumor. Precise and timely diagnosis of pediatric MB and its four subtypes (defined by the World Health Organization (WHO)) is essential to decide the appropriate follow-up plan and suitable treatments to prevent its progression and reduce mortality rates. Histopathology is the gold standard modality for the diagnosis of MB and its subtypes, but manual diagnosis via a pathologist is very complicated, needs excessive time, and is subjective to the pathologists’ expertise and skills, which may lead to variability in the diagnosis or misdiagnosis. The main purpose of the paper is to propose a time-efficient and reliable computer-aided diagnosis (CADx), namely MB-AI-His, for the automatic diagnosis of pediatric MB and its subtypes from histopathological images. The main challenge in this work is the lack of datasets available for the diagnosis of pediatric MB and its four subtypes and the limited related work. Related studies are based on either textural analysis or deep learning (DL) feature extraction methods. These studies used individual features to perform the classification task. However, MB-AI-His combines the benefits of DL techniques and textural analysis feature extraction methods through a cascaded manner. First, it uses three DL convolutional neural networks (CNNs), including DenseNet-201, MobileNet, and ResNet-50 CNNs to extract spatial DL features. Next, it extracts time-frequency features from the spatial DL features based on the discrete wavelet transform (DWT), which is a textural analysis method. Finally, MB-AI-His fuses the three spatial-time-frequency features generated from the three CNNs and DWT using the discrete cosine transform (DCT) and principal component analysis (PCA) to produce a time-efficient CADx system. MB-AI-His merges the privileges of different CNN architectures. MB-AI-His has a binary classification level for classifying among normal and abnormal MB images, and a multi-classification level to classify among the four subtypes of MB. The results of MB-AI-His show that it is accurate and reliable for both the binary and multi-class classification levels. It is also a time-efficient system as both the PCA and DCT methods have efficiently reduced the training execution time. The performance of MB-AI-His is compared with related CADx systems, and the comparison verified the powerfulness of MB-AI-His and its outperforming results. Therefore, it can support pathologists in the accurate and reliable diagnosis of MB and its subtypes from histopathological images. It can also reduce the time and cost of the diagnosis procedure which will correspondingly lead to lower death rates.