CC-DCNet: Dynamic Convolutional Neural Network with Contrastive Constraints for Identifying Lung Cancer Subtypes on Multi-modality Images

The accurate diagnosis of pathological subtypes of lung cancer is of paramount importance for follow-up treatments and prognosis managements. Assessment methods utilizing deep learning technologies have introduced novel approaches for clinical diagnosis. However, the majority of existing models rely solely on single-modality image input, leading to limited diagnostic accuracy. To this end, we propose a novel deep learning network designed to accurately classify lung cancer subtype with multi-dimensional and multi-modality images, i.e., CT and pathological images. The strength of the proposed model lies in its ability to dynamically process both paired CT-pathological image sets as well as independent CT image sets, and consequently optimize the pathology-related feature extractions from CT images. This adaptive learning approach enhances the flexibility in processing multi-dimensional and multi-modality datasets and results in performance elevating in the model testing phase. We also develop a contrastive constraint module, which quantitatively maps the cross-modality associations through network training, and thereby helps to explore the "gold standard" pathological information from the corresponding CT scans. To evaluate the effectiveness, adaptability, and generalization ability of our model, we conducted extensive experiments on a large-scale multi-center dataset and compared our model with a series of state-of-the-art classification models. The experimental results demonstrated the superiority of our model for lung cancer subtype classification, showcasing significant improvements in accuracy metrics such as ACC, AUC, and F1-score.