Deep Learning-Based Artificial Intelligence System for Automatic Assessment of Glomerular Pathological Findings in Lupus Nephritis

Accurate assessment of renal histopathology is crucial for the clinical management of patients with lupus nephritis (LN). However, the current classification system has poor interpathologist agreement. This paper proposes a deep convolutional neural network (CNN)-based system that detects and classi...

Descripción completa

Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Zhaohui Zheng, Xiangsen Zhang, Jin Ding, Dingwen Zhang, Jihong Cui, Xianghui Fu, Junwei Han, Ping Zhu
Formato: article
Lenguaje:EN
Publicado: MDPI AG 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://doaj.org/article/36a7fad20db24340aca6e81348af65c3
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
Descripción
Sumario:Accurate assessment of renal histopathology is crucial for the clinical management of patients with lupus nephritis (LN). However, the current classification system has poor interpathologist agreement. This paper proposes a deep convolutional neural network (CNN)-based system that detects and classifies glomerular pathological findings in LN. A dataset of 349 renal biopsy whole-slide images (WSIs) (163 patients with LN, periodic acid-Schiff stain, 3906 glomeruli) annotated by three expert nephropathologists was used. The CNN models YOLOv4 and VGG16 were employed to localise the glomeruli and classify glomerular lesions (slight/severe impairments or sclerotic lesions). An additional 321 unannotated WSIs from 161 patients were used for performance evaluation at the per-patient kidney level. The proposed model achieved an accuracy of 0.951 and Cohen’s kappa of 0.932 (95% CI 0.915–0.949) for the entire test set for classifying the glomerular lesions. For multiclass detection at the glomerular level, the mean average precision of the CNN was 0.807, with ‘slight’ and ‘severe’ glomerular lesions being easily identified (F1: 0.924 and 0.952, respectively). At the per-patient kidney level, the model achieved a high agreement with nephropathologist (linear weighted kappa: 0.855, 95% CI: 0.795–0.916, <i>p</i> < 0.001; quadratic weighted kappa: 0.906, 95% CI: 0.873–0.938, <i>p</i> < 0.001). The results suggest that deep learning is a feasible assistive tool for the objective and automatic assessment of pathological LN lesions.