Background: The goal of the study was to create a histopathology image classification automation system that could identify odontogenic keratocysts in hematoxylin and eosin-stained jaw cyst sections.
Methods: From 54 odontogenic keratocysts, 23 dentigerous cysts, and 20 radicular cysts, about 2657 microscopic pictures with 400× magnification were obtained. The images were annotated by a pathologist and categorized into epithelium, cystic lumen, and stroma of keratocysts and non-keratocysts. Preprocessing was performed in two steps; the first is data augmentation, as the Deep Learning techniques (DLT) improve their performance with increased data size. Secondly, the epithelial region was selected as the region of interest.
Results: Four experiments were conducted using the DLT. In the first, a pre-trained VGG16 was employed to classify after-image augmentation. In the second, DenseNet-169 was implemented for image classification on the augmented images. In the third, DenseNet-169 was trained on the two-step preprocessed images. In the last experiment, two and three results were averaged to obtain an accuracy of 93% on OKC and non-OKC images.
Conclusions: The proposed algorithm may fit into the automation system of OKC and non-OKC diagnosis. Utmost care was taken in the manual process of image acquisition (minimum 28-30 images/slide at 40× magnification covering the entire stretch of epithelium and stromal component). Further, there is scope to improve the accuracy rate and make it human bias free by using a whole slide imaging scanner for image acquisition from slides.
Keywords: deep learning; dentigerous cysts; histopathology images; image classification; odontogenic keratocysts; radicular cysts.