摘要
Developing an automatic and credible diagnostic system to analyze the type,stage,and level of the liver cancer from Hematoxylin and Eosin(H&E)images is a very challenging and time-consuming endeavor,even for experienced pathologists,due to the non-uniform illumination and artifacts.Albeit several Machine Learning(ML)and Deep Learning(DL)approaches are employed to increase the performance of automatic liver cancer diagnostic systems,the classi-fication accuracy of these systems still needs significant improvement to satisfy the real-time requirement of the diagnostic situations.In this work,we present a new Ensemble Classifier(hereafter called ECNet)to classify the H&E stained liver histopathology images effectively.The proposed model employs a Dropout Extreme Learning Machine(DrpXLM)and the Enhanced Convolutional Block Attention Modules(ECBAM)based residual network.ECNet applies Voting Mechanism(VM)to integrate the decisions of individual classifiers using the average of probabilities rule.Initially,the nuclei regions in the H&E stain are seg-mented through Super-resolution Convolutional Networks(SrCN),and then these regions are fed into the ensemble DL network for classification.The effectiveness of the proposed model is carefully studied on real-world datasets.The results of our meticulous experiments on the Kasturba Medical College(KMC)liver dataset reveal that the proposed ECNet significantly outperforms other existing classifica-tion networks with better accuracy,sensitivity,specificity,precision,and Jaccard Similarity Score(JSS)of 96.5%,99.4%,89.7%,95.7%,and 95.2%,respectively.We obtain similar results from ECNet when applied to The Cancer Genome Atlas Liver Hepatocellular Carcinoma(TCGA-LIHC)dataset regarding accuracy(96.3%),sensitivity(97.5%),specificity(93.2%),precision(97.5%),and JSS(95.1%).More importantly,the proposed ECNet system consumes only 12.22 s for training and 1.24 s for testing.Also,we carry out the Wilcoxon statistical test to determine whether the ECNet provides a considerable improvement with respect to evaluation metrics or not.From extensive empirical analysis,we can conclude that our ECNet is the better liver cancer diagnostic model related to state-of-the-art classifiers.
