Learning a Triplet Embedding Distance to Represent Gleason Patterns.

ABSTRACT

Gleason grade stratification is the main histological standard to determine the severity and progression of prostate cancer. Nonetheless, there is a high variability on disease diagnosis among expert pathologists (kappa lower than 0.44). End-to-end deep representations have recently deal with the automatic classification of Gleason grades, where each grade is limited to namely code high-visual-variability sharing patterns among classes. Such limitation on models may be attributed to the relatively few labels to train the representation, as well as, to the natural imbalanced sets, available in clinical scenarios. To overcome such limitation, this work introduces a new embedding representation that learns intra and inter-Gleason relationships from more challenging class samples (grades tree and fourth). The proposed strategy implements a triplet loss scheme building a hidden embedding space that correctly differentiates close Gleason levels. The proposed approach shows promising results achieving an average accuracy of 74% to differentiate between degrees three and four. For classification of all degrees, the proposed approach achieves an average accuracy of 62%.