{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,10,22]],"date-time":"2026-10-22T15:11:14Z","timestamp":1792681874408,"version":"4.5.0"},"reference-count":34,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"2","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2023,1,31]],"date-time":"2023-01-31T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1675123200000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"name":"National Natural Science Foundation of China","award":["61901292"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["61901292"]}]},{"name":"National Natural Science Foundation of China","award":["11771321"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["11771321"]}]},{"name":"National Natural Science Foundation of China","award":["6210137"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["6210137"]}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Life"],"abstract":"<jats:p>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.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/life13020399","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2023,2,1]],"date-time":"2023-02-01T03:22:47Z","timestamp":1675221767000},"page":"399","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":23,"title":["Accurate Kidney Pathological Image Classification Method Based on Deep Learning and Multi-Modal Fusion Method with Application to Membranous Nephropathy"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"13","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-7194-5771","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Fang","family":"Hao","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Data Science, Taiyuan University of Technology, Taiyuan 030024, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Xueyu","family":"Liu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Data Science, Taiyuan University of Technology, Taiyuan 030024, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Ming","family":"Li","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Data Science, Taiyuan University of Technology, Taiyuan 030024, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Weixia","family":"Han","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Pathology, Second Hospital of Shanxi Medical University, Taiyuan 030001, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2023,1,31]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"3739","DOI":"10.1681\/ASN.2016010093","article-title":"Long-Term Exposure to Air Pollution and Increased Risk of Membranous Nephropathy in China","volume":"27","author":"Xu","year":"2016","journal-title":"J. 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