Glomerulus Detection on Light Microscopic Images of Renal Pathology with the Faster R-CNN

Glomerulus is an important component in human kidney. The appearance of the glomeruli on light microscopic image can provide abundant information for disease diagnosis. Due to the importance of glomeruli on accurate renal disease diagnosis, this paper proposes an automatic method to detect glomeruli in light microscopy images with Periodic Acid Schiff (PAS) or hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) stains at 100x, 200x, or 400x optical magnification. The faster region-based convolutional neural network (R-CNN) is applied to the detection task. The proposed detection approach performs an end-to-end glomerulus detection without any a priori information of the stains and magnifications of the images. The training dataset contains 2,511 images with 3,956 glomeruli. The test dataset contains 482 images with 563 glomeruli. The recall and precision of the test result are 91.54% and 86.50%, respectively, which shows the effectiveness of the proposed detection method.