Artificial intelligence can accurately distinguish IgA nephropathy from diabetic nephropathy under Masson staining and becomes an important assistant for renal pathologists

Abstract

Introduction: Hyperplasia of the mesangial area is common in IgA nephropathy (IgAN) and diabetic nephropathy (DN), and it is often difficult to distinguish them by light microscopy alone, especially in the absence of clinical data. At present, artificial intelligence (AI) is widely used in pathological diagnosis, but mainly in tumor pathology. The application of AI in renal pathological is still in its infancy.

Methods: Patients diagnosed as IgAN or DN by renal biopsy in First Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang Chinese Medicine University from September 1, 2020 to April 30, 2022 were selected as the training set, and patients who diagnosed from May 1, 2022 to June 30, 2022 were selected as the test set. We focused on the glomerulus and captured the field of the glomerulus in Masson staining WSI at 200x magnification, all in 1,000 × 1,000 pixels JPEG format. We augmented the data from training set through minor affine transformation, and then randomly split the training set into training and adjustment data according to 8:2. The training data and the Yolov5 6.1 algorithm were used to train the AI model with constant adjustment of parameters according to the adjusted data. Finally, we obtained the optimal model, tested this model with test set and compared it with renal pathologists.

Results: AI can accurately detect the glomeruli. The overall accuracy of AI glomerulus detection was 98.67% and the omission rate was only 1.30%. No Intact glomerulus was missed. The overall accuracy of AI reached 73.24%, among which the accuracy of IgAN reached 77.27% and DN reached 69.59%. The AUC of IgAN was 0.733 and that of DN was 0.627. In addition, compared with renal pathologists, AI can distinguish IgAN from DN more quickly and accurately, and has higher consistency.

Discussion: We constructed an AI model based on Masson staining images of renal tissue to distinguish IgAN from DN. This model has also been successfully deployed in the work of renal pathologists to assist them in their daily diagnosis and teaching work.

Keywords: IgA nephropathy; Yolov5 6.1; artificial intelligence; diabetic nephropathy; renal pathology.

Figure 1

Flowcharts for deep learning and study plan.

Figure 2

The ability of AI to distinguish IgAN from diabetic nephropathy.

Figure 3

Compare the time and accuracy of diagnosis between AI and pathologist. (A): the time it takes for the AI and pathologist to distinguish between 50 images; (B): the accuracy of the AI and pathologist to distinguish between 50 pathological images.

Figure 4

Yolov5 6.1 Network structure (A): schematic diagram of Yolov5 6.1 network structure; (B): SiLU function; (C): differences between SPP and SPPF.

Figure 5

Schematic diagram of the model deployed in the LAN.