Atlas of Digital Pathology: A Generalized Hierarchical Histological Tissue Type-Annotated Database for Deep Learning

Abstract

In recent years, computer vision techniques have made large advances in image recognition and been applied to aid radiological diagnosis. Computational pathology aims to develop similar tools for aiding pathologists in diagnosing digitized histopathological slides, which would improve diagnostic accuracy and productivity amidst increasing workloads. However, there is a lack of publicly-available databases of (1) localized patch-level images annotated with (2) a large range of Histological Tissue Type (HTT). As a result, computational pathology research is constrained to diagnosing specific diseases or classifying tissues from specific organs, and cannot be readily generalized to handle unexpected diseases and organs. In this paper, we propose a new digital pathology database, the ``Atlas of Digital Pathology'' (or ADP), which comprises of 17,668 patch images extracted from 100 slides annotated with up to 57 hierarchical HTTs. Our data is generalized to different tissue types across different organs and aims to provide training data for supervised multi-label learning of patch-level HTT in a digitized whole slide image. We demonstrate the quality of our image labels through pathologist consultation and by training three state-of-the-art neural networks on tissue type classification. Quantitative results support the visually consistency of our data and we demonstrate a tissue type-based visual attention aid as a sample tool that could be developed from our database.