Computer extracted features of gland morphology on H&E surgically resected tissue images as predictive of biochemical recurrence and rate of expression in African American compared to Caucasian American men.

Abstract

e16559 Background: Prostate cancer (PCa) is 1.7 times more prevalent and 2.3 times more lethal in African American (AA) men than in Caucasian American (CA) men. Additionally there is a higher incidence (when controlling for relative population size) of more aggressive PCa in the AA compared to the CA population which has led a number of groups to investigate whether there are molecular differences in the disease phenotype between the two groups. In this work we investigate whether computer extracted features of glandular morphology from digitized pathology images of surgical specimens identified as predictive of biochemical recurrence are also differentially expressed between AA and CA patients. Methods: Two cohorts were gathered. Cohort 1 (C1) contained digitized whole mount Gleason 7 radical prostatectomy specimens (RPS) from 72 patients (46 CA, 26 AA). Cohort 2 (C2) comprising quarter and whole mount RPS from 145 patients (135 CA, 10 AA), who either had biochemical recurrence in 5 years (47) or did not (98). A pathologist annotated each image in both cohorts for a representative cancerous region. Glands were automatically segmented and 216 features describing gland arrangement, shape, and disorder were extracted from every image. Features were tested for significance by Wilcoxon rank sum test at p < .05. Results: 8 features of gland morphology were significantly different between AA and CA groups and also predictive of biochemical recurrence (Table). Conclusions: We identified 8 computer extracted features of gland morphology that were both differentially expressed between AA and CA men and predictive of biochemical recurrence, suggesting that there are histomorphometric differences in prostate cancer appearance between AA and CA men. [Table: see text]