Lymphocyte-Infiltrated Periportal Region Detection With Structurally-Refined Deep Portal Segmentation and Heterogeneous Infiltration Features

<italic>Goal</italic>: The early diagnosis and treatment of hepatitis is essential to reduce hepatitis-related liver function deterioration and mortality. One component of the widely-used Ishak grading system for the grading of periportal interface hepatitis is based on the percentage of...

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Main Authors: Hung-Wen Tsai, Chien-Yu Chiou, Wei-Jong Yang, Tsan-An Hsieh, Cheng-Yi Chen, Che-Wei Hsu, Yih-Jyh Lin, Min-En Hsieh, Matthew M. Yeh, Chin-Chun Chen, Meng-Ru Shen, Pau-Choo Chung
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2024-01-01
Series:IEEE Open Journal of Engineering in Medicine and Biology
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Online Access:https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10476647/
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Summary:<italic>Goal</italic>: The early diagnosis and treatment of hepatitis is essential to reduce hepatitis-related liver function deterioration and mortality. One component of the widely-used Ishak grading system for the grading of periportal interface hepatitis is based on the percentage of portal borders infiltrated by lymphocytes. Thus, the accurate detection of lymphocyte-infiltrated periportal regions is critical in the diagnosis of hepatitis. However, the infiltrating lymphocytes usually result in the formation of ambiguous and highly-irregular portal boundaries, and thus identifying the infiltrated portal boundary regions precisely using automated methods is challenging. This study aims to develop a deep-learning-based automatic detection framework to assist diagnosis. <italic>Methods</italic>: The present study proposes a framework consisting of a Structurally-REfined Deep Portal Segmentation module and an Infiltrated Periportal Region Detection module based on heterogeneous infiltration features to accurately identify the infiltrated periportal regions in liver Whole Slide Images. <italic>Results</italic>: The proposed method achieves 0.725 in F1-score of lymphocyte-infiltrated periportal region detection. Moreover, the statistics of the ratio of the detected infiltrated portal boundary have high correlation to the Ishak grade (Spearman&#x0027;s correlations more than 0.87 with p-values less than 0.001) and medium correlation to the liver function index aspartate aminotransferase and alanine aminotransferase (Spearman&#x0027;s correlations more than 0.63 and 0.57 with p-values less than 0.001). <italic>Conclusions</italic>: The study shows the statistics of the ratio of infiltrated portal boundary have correlation to the Ishak grade and liver function index. The proposed framework provides pathologists with a useful and reliable tool for hepatitis diagnosis.
ISSN:2644-1276