Frozen-to-Paraffin: Categorization of Histological Frozen Sections by the Aid of Paraffin Sections and Generative Adversarial Networks

In contrast to paraffin sections, frozen sections can be quickly generated during surgical interventions. This procedure allows surgeons to wait for histological findings during the intervention to base intraoperative decisions on the outcome of the histology. However, compared to paraffin sections, the quality of frozen sections is typically lower, leading to a higher ratio of miss-classification. In this work, we investigated the effect of the section type on automated decision support approaches for classification of thyroid cancer. This was enabled by a data set consisting of pairs of sections for individual patients. Moreover, we investigated, whether a frozen-to-paraffin translation could help to optimize classification scores. Finally, we propose a specific data augmentation strategy to deal with a small amount of training data and to increase classification accuracy even further.