ABC: Artificial Intelligence for Bladder Cancer grading system

Abstract

Bladder cancer tissue grading, which assigns a numerical grade reflecting how aggressive a tumor looks under a microscope, is essential to determine the proper course of treatment, design a therapeutic plan and determine prognosis. The major problem is that there are considerable and clinically relevant variations in grading by pathologists – as they are humans with different opinions and experience – including in bladder cancer. This work presents a solution, i.e., Artificial Intelligence for Bladder Cancer grading (ABC) system, that is developed based on deep neural network architectures to provide a more reliable and accurate diagnosis for patients affected by this deadly disease and ultimately improve management and clinical outcomes. Whole Slide Images (WSI) are split up into equally-sized square tiles and annotated to build a training dataset. ABC introduces a new grading system concept that can provide a percentage distribution of each different grade in a specific tumor, unlike the current numerical grade value between 1 and 3 based on the general impression of the pathologist. This new approach aims to provide a more granular grading of bladder cancer tissues and better capture tumor grade heterogeneity. This new concept may offer a more precise prognosis and optimize management in the future. The ABC learning model is fully configurable, and any deep architecture model can be trained and used by ABC. Some trained models developed by ABC have shown high accuracy and consistency in grading and intra-observer variability. The combination of a loosely coupled architecture and fully integrated tiles’ utilization makes ABC a universal, scalable, and versatile system that could be configured and deployed worldwide.