| Summary: | Membranous nephropathy is one of the most prevalent conditions responsible for nephrotic syndrome in adults. It is clinically nonspecific and mainly diagnosed by kidney biopsy pathology, with three prevalent techniques: light microscopy, electron microscopy, and immunofluorescence microscopy. Manual observation of glomeruli one by one under the microscope is very time-consuming, and there are certain differences in the observation results between physicians. This study makes use of whole-slide images scanned by a light microscope as well as immunofluorescence images to classify patients with membranous nephropathy. The framework mainly includes a glomerular segmentation module, a confidence coefficient extraction module, and a multi-modal fusion module. This framework first identifies and segments the glomerulus from whole-slide images and immunofluorescence images, and then a glomerular classifier is trained to extract the features of each glomerulus. The results are then combined to produce the final diagnosis. The results of the experiments show that the F1-score of image classification results obtained by combining two kinds of features, which can reach 97.32%, is higher than those obtained by using only light-microscopy-observed images or immunofluorescent images, which reach 92.76% and 93.20%, respectively. Experiments demonstrate that considering both WSIs and immunofluorescence images is effective in improving the diagnosis of membranous nephropathy.
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