Detecting basal cell carcinoma in skin histopathological images using deep learning

Abstract

In this thesis we explore different machine learning techniques that are common in image classification to detect the presence of Basal Cell Carcinoma (BCC) in digital skin histological images. Since digital histology images are extremely large, we first focused on determining the presence of BCC at the patch level, using pre-trained deep convolutional neural networks as feature extractors to compensate for the size of our datasets. The experimental results show that our patch level classifiers obtained an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.981. Finally, we used our patch classifiers to generate a bag of scores for a given whole slide image (WSI), and attempted multiple ways of combining these scores to produce a single significant score to predict the presence of BCC in the given WSI. Our best performing model obtained an AUC of 0.991 in 86 samples of digital skin biopsies, 43 of which had BCC.