Artificial Intelligence-Based Tissue Phenotyping in Colorectal Cancer Histopathology Using Visual and Semantic Features Aggregation

Tissue phenotyping of the tumor microenvironment has a decisive role in digital profiling of intra-tumor heterogeneity, epigenetics, and progression of cancer. Most of the existing methods for tissue phenotyping often rely on time-consuming and error-prone manual procedures. Recently, with the advent of advanced technologies, these procedures have been automated using artificial intelligence techniques. In this paper, a novel deep histology heterogeneous feature aggregation network (HHFA-Net) is proposed based on visual and semantic information fusion for the detection of tissue phenotypes in colorectal cancer (CRC). We adopted and tested various data augmentation techniques to avoid computationally expensive stain normalization procedures and handle limited and imbalanced data problems. Three publicly available datasets are used in the experiments: CRC tissue phenotyping (CRC-TP), CRC histology (CRCH), and colon cancer histology (CCH). The proposed HHFA-Net achieves higher accuracies than the state-of-the-art methods for tissue phenotyping in CRC histopathology images.