Improved Prediction on Heart Transplant Rejection Using Convolutional Autoencoder and Multiple Instance Learning on Whole-Slide Imaging

Heart transplant rejection is one major threat for the survival of patients with a heart transplant. Endomyocardial biopsies are effective in showing signs of heart transplant rejection even before patients have any symptoms. Manually examining the tissue samples is costly, time-consuming and error-prone. With recent advances in deep learning (DL) based image processing methods, automatic training and prediction on heart transplant rejection using whole-slide images expect to be promising. This paper develops an advanced pipeline for quality control, feature extraction, clustering and classification. We first implement a stacked convolutional autoencoder to extract feature maps for each tile; we then incorporate multiple instance learning (MIL) with dimensionality reduction and unsupervised clustering prior to classification. Our results show that utilizing unsupervised clustering after feature extraction can achieve higher classification results while preserving the capability for multi-class classification.