Grading the Dominant Pathological Indices in Liver Diseases from Pathological Images Using Radiomics Methods

This study aims to diagnose the severity of important pathological indices, i.e., fibrosis, steatosis, lobular inflammation, and ballooning from the pathological images of the liver tissue based on extracted features by radiomics methods.

This research uses the pathological images obtained from liver tissue samples for 258 laboratory mice. After preprocessing the images and data augmentation, a collection of texture feature sets extracted by gray-level-based algorithms, including Global, Gray-level Co-Occurrence Matrix (GLCM), Gray-level Run length Matrix (GLRLM), Gray-level Size Zone Matrix (GLSZM), and Neighboring Gray Tone Difference Matrix (NGTDM) algorithms. Then, advanced methods of classification, namely Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF), Quadratic Discriminant Analysis (QDA), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Logistic Regression (LR), Naïve Bayes (NB), and Multi-layer Perceptrons (MLP) are employed. This procedure is provided separately for each of the four indices of fibrosis level in 6 grading classes, steatosis in 5 grading classes, inflammation in 4 grading classes, and ballooning in 3 grading classes. For a comparison of the output of these algorithms, the accuracy value obtained from the evaluation data is presented for the performance of different methods.

The results showed that, compared to other methods, the Gaussian SVM algorithm provides a better response to the classification of the grading of liver disease among all the indices from the pathological images due to its structural features. This value of accuracy was calculated at 84.30% for fibrosis, 90.55% for steatosis, 81.11% for inflammation, and 95.98% for ballooning.

This fully automatic framework based on advanced radiomics algorithms and machine learning from pathological images can be very useful in clinical procedures and be considered as an assistant or a substitute for pathologists’ diagnoses.