Artificial Intelligence Recognition Model Using Liquid-based Cytology Images to Discriminate Malignancy and Histological Types of Non-small-cell Lung Cancer.

Introduction: Artificial intelligence image recognition has applications in clinical practice. The purpose of this study was to develop an automated image classification model for lung cancer cytology using a deep learning convolutional neural network (DCNN).

Methods: Liquid-based cytology samples from 8 normal parenchymal (N), 22 adenocarcinoma (ADC), and 15 squamous cell carcinoma (SQCC) surgical specimens were prepared, and 45 Papanicolaou-stained slides were scanned using whole-slide imaging. The final dataset of 9,141 patches consisted of 2,737 N, 4756 ADC, and 1648 SQCC samples. Densenet-121 was used as the DCNN to classify N versus malignant (ADC+SQCC) and ADC versus SQCC images. AdamW optimizer and 5-fold cross-validation were used in the training.

Results: For malignancy prediction, the sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy were 0.97, 0.85, and 0.94, respectively, in the patch-level classification, and 0.92, 0.88, and 0.91, respectively, in the case-level classification. For SQCC prediction, the sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy were 0.86, 0.91, and 0.90, respectively, in the patch-level classification and 0.73, 0.82, and 0.78, respectively, in the case-level classification.

Conclusion: The DCNN model performed excellently in predicting malignancy and histological types of lung cancer. This model may be useful for predicting cytopathological diagnosis in clinical situations by reinforcing training.