ScanNet: A fast and dense scanning framework for metastastic breast cancer detection from whole-slide image

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 directions in the field of medical image computing, which aims to alleviate pathologists' workload and simultaneously reduce 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 resulting in a large number of false positives. 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 microand 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 even surpassed human performance on the WSI classification task.