Glomerulus Classification via an Improved GoogLeNet

Glomerulosclerosis is a pathomorphological feature of glomerular lesions. Early detection, accurate judgement and effective prevention of the glomeruli is crucial not only for people with kidney disease, but also for the general population. We proposed a method in combination of traditional image analysis with modern machine learning diagnosis system model based on GoogLeNet for recognizing and distinguishing different categories of glomerulus in order to efficiently capture the important structures as well as to minimize manual effort and supervision. We proposed a novel deep learning model based on GoogLeNet with added batch-normalization layers to extract useful features and subsequently entered the features into SoftMax for classification. We also incorporated Bayesian Optimization algorithm and k-fold cross validation in this system for achieving a more reliable result. Our method has eventually achieved an overall accuracy of 95.04±4.99%, and F1 score of 94.44±3.11% for no glomerulus category, 96.73±5.23% for normal glomerulus category and 93.66±7.82% for globally sclerosed glomerulus category, which means this method can accurately determine the degree of glomerulosclerosis with little supervision. The experimental result also shows that this method has better performance when compared with other state-of art methods.