Lymph node metastasis is one of the most significant diagnostic indicators in breast cancer, which is traditionally observed under the microscope by pathologists. In recent years, computerized histology diagnosis has become one of the most rapidly expanding fields in medical image computing, which alleviates pathologists' workload and reduces misdiagnosis rate. However, automatic detection of lymph node metastases from whole slide images remains a challenging problem, due to the large-scale data with enormous resolutions and existence of hard mimics. In this paper, we propose a novel framework by leveraging fully convolutional networks for efficient inference to meet the speed requirement for clinical practice, while reconstructing dense predictions under different offsets for ensuring accurate detection on both micro- and macro-metastases. Incorporating with the strategies of asynchronous sample prefetching and hard negative mining, the network can be effectively trained. Extensive experiments on the benchmark dataset of 2016 Camelyon Grand Challenge corroborated the efficacy of our method. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, our method achieved superior performance with a faster speed on the tumor localization task and surpassed human performance on the WSI classification task.

本文研究了利用卷积神经网络的计算机诊断技术在乳腺癌病理学中的应用，从组织样本的全幅图像中快速自动检测淋巴结转移的新方法，并且在2016年Camelyon Grand Challenge的数据集上取得了优异的性能，不仅比其他同类方法检测肿瘤定位的速度更快，而且在WSI分类任务上超越了人类表现。

ScanNet: 一种快速稠密的滑片图像扫描框架，用于乳腺癌转移的检测