Lymphocyte-Infiltrated Periportal Region Detection With Structurally-Refined Deep Portal Segmentation and Heterogeneous Infiltration Features

Goal: The early diagnosis and treatment of hepatitis is essential to reduce hepatitis-related liver function deterioration and mortality. One component of the widely-used Ishak grading system for the grading of periportal interface hepatitis is based on the percentage of portal borders infiltrated by lymphocytes. Thus, the accurate detection of lymphocyte-infiltrated periportal regions is critical in the diagnosis of hepatitis. However, the infiltrating lymphocytes usually result in the formation of ambiguous and highly-irregular portal boundaries, and thus identifying the infiltrated portal boundary regions precisely using automated methods is challenging. This study aims to develop a deep-learning-based automatic detection framework to assist diagnosis. Methods: The present study proposes a framework consisting of a Structurally-REfined Deep Portal Segmentation module and an Infiltrated Periportal Region Detection module based on heterogeneous infiltration features to accurately identify the infiltrated periportal regions in liver Whole Slide Images. Results: The proposed method achieves 0.725 in F1-score of lymphocyte-infiltrated periportal region detection. Moreover, the statistics of the ratio of the detected infiltrated portal boundary have high correlation to the Ishak grade (Spearman's correlations more than 0.87 with p-values less than 0.001) and medium correlation to the liver function index aspartate aminotransferase and alanine aminotransferase (Spearman's correlations more than 0.63 and 0.57 with p-values less than 0.001). Conclusions: The study shows the statistics of the ratio of infiltrated portal boundary have correlation to the Ishak grade and liver function index. The proposed framework provides pathologists with a useful and reliable tool for hepatitis diagnosis.