Generating synthetic samples of chondrosarcoma histopathology with a denoising diffusion probabilistic model.

Abstract

e13592 Background: The emergence of digital pathology — an image-based environment for the acquisition, management and interpretation of pathology information supported by computational techniques for data extraction and analysis — is changing the pathology ecosystem. The development of machine-learning approaches for the extraction of information from image data, allows for tissue interrogation in a way that was not previously possible. However, creating digital pathology algorithms requires large volumes of training data, often on the order of thousands of histopathology slides. This becomes problematic for rare diseases, where imaging datasets of such size do not exist. This makes it impossible to train digital pathology models for these rare conditions. However, recent advances in generative deep learning models may provide a method for overcoming this lack of histology data for rare diseases. Pre-trained diffusion-based probabilistic models can be used to create photorealistic variations of existing images. In this study, we explored the potential of using a deep generative model created by OpenAI for the purpose of producing synthetic histopathology images, using chondrosarcoma as our rare tumor of interest. Methods: Our team compiled a dataset of 55 chondrosarcoma histolopathology images from the annotated records of Dr. Henry Jaffe, a pioneering authority in musculoskeletal pathology. We built a deep learning image-generation application in a Jupyter notebook environment, iterating upon OpenAI’s DALL-E application processing interface (API) with python programming language. Using the chondrosarcoma histology dataset and NVIDIA GPUs, we trained the deep learning application to generate multiple synthetic variations of each real chondrosarcoma image. Results: After several hours, the deep learning model successfully generated 1,000 images of chondrosarcoma from 55 original images. The synthetic histology images retained photorealistic quality and displayed characteristic cellular features of chondrosarcoma tumor tissue. Conclusions: Deep generative models may be useful in addressing issues of data scarcity in rare diseases, such as chondrosarcoma. For example, in situations where existing imaging data is insufficient for training diagnostic computer vision models, diffusion-based generative models could be applied to create training datasets. However, further exploration of ethical considerations and qualitative analyses of these generated data are needed.