Mitotic count is a commonly used method to assess the level of progression of breast cancer, which is now the fourth most prevalent cancer. Unfortunately, counting mitosis is a tedious and subjective task with poor reproducibility, especially for non-experts. Luckily, since the machine can read and compare more data with greater efficiency this could be the next modern technique to count mitosis. Furthermore, technological advancements in medicine have led to the increase in image data available for use in training. In this work, we propose a network constructed using a similar approach to one that has been used for image fraud detection with the segmented image map as the second stream input to Faster RCNN. This region-based detection model combines a fully convolutional Region Proposal Network to generate proposals and a classification network to classify each of these proposals as containing mitosis or not. Features from both streams are fused in the bilinear pooling layer to maintain the spatial concurrence of each. After training this model on the ICPR 2014 MITOSIS contest dataset, we received an F-measure score of 0.507, higher than both the winners score and scores from recent tests on the same data. Our method is clinically applicable, taking only around five min per ten full High Power Field slides when tested on a Quadro P6000 cloud GPU.
With technological advances leading to an increase in mechanisms of image tampering, our fraud detection methods must continue to be upgraded to match their sophistication. One problem with current methods is that they require prior knowledge of the method of forgery in order to determine which features to extract from the image to localize the region of interest. When a machine learning algorithm is used to learn different types tampering from a large set of various image types, with a big enough database we can easily classify which images are tampered (by training on the entire image feature map for each image), but we still are left with the question of which features to train on, and how to localize the manipulation. To solve this, object detection networks such as Faster RCNN, which combine an RPN (Region Proposal Network) with a CNN have recently been adapted to fraud detection by utilizing their ability to propose bounding boxes for objects of interest to localize the tampering artifacts. In this work, an existing bilinear Faster RCNN model that was developed will be modified with the second stream having an input of the ELA (Error Level Analysis) JPEG compression level mask.