Stacked Predictive Sparse Coding for Classification of Distinct Regions in Tumor Histopathology

Image-based classification of histology sections, in terms of distinct components (e.g., tumor, stroma, normal), provides a series of indices for tumor composition. Furthermore, aggregation of these indices, from each whole slide image (WSI) in a large cohort, can provide predictive models of the clinical outcome. However, performance of the existing techniques is hindered as a result of large technical variations and biological heterogeneities that are always present in a large cohort. We propose a system that automatically learns a series of basis functions for representing the underlying spatial distribution using stacked predictive sparse decomposition (PSD). The learned representation is then fed into the spatial pyramid matching framework (SPM) with a linear SVM classifier. The system has been evaluated for classification of (a) distinct histological components for two cohorts of tumor types, and (b) colony organization of normal and malignant cell lines in 3D cell culture models. Throughput has been increased through the utility of graphical processing unit (GPU), and evaluation indicates a superior performance results, compared with previous research.