Stained Histopathology Images Research Articles

Prediction of HER2 Status Based on Deep Learning in H&E-Stained Histopathology Images of Bladder Cancer.

Epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) has been widely recognized as one of the targets for bladder cancer immunotherapy. The key to implementing personalized treatment for bladder cancer patients lies in achieving rapid and accurate diagnosis. To tackle this challenge, we have pioneered the application of deep learning techniques to predict HER2 expression status from H&E-stained pathological images of bladder cancer, bypassing the need for intricate IHC staining or high-throughput sequencing methods. Our model, when subjected to rigorous testing within the cohort from the People's Hospital of Wuhan University, which encompasses 106 cases, has exhibited commendable performance on both the validation and test datasets. Specifically, the validation set yielded an AUC of 0.92, an accuracy of 0.86, a sensitivity of 0.87, a specificity of 0.83, and an F1 score of 86.7%. The corresponding metrics for the test set were 0.88 for AUC, 0.67 for accuracy, 0.56 for sensitivity, 0.75 for specificity, and 77.8% for F1 score. Additionally, in a direct comparison with pathologists, our model demonstrated statistically superior performance, with a p-value less than 0.05, highlighting its potential as a powerful diagnostic tool.

Adapting SAM to Histopathology Images for Tumor Bud Segmentation in Colorectal Cancer.

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the third most common cancer in the United States. Tumor Budding (TB) detection and quantification are crucial yet labor-intensive steps in determining the CRC stage through the analysis of histopathology images. To help with this process, we adapt the Segment Anything Model (SAM) on the CRC histopathology images to segment TBs using SAM-Adapter. In this approach, we automatically take task-specific prompts from CRC images and train the SAM model in a parameter-efficient way. We compare the predictions of our model with the predictions from a trained-from-scratch model using the annotations from a pathologist. As a result, our model achieves an intersection over union (IoU) of 0.65 and an instance-level Dice score of 0.75, which are promising in matching the pathologist's TB annotation. We believe our study offers a novel solution to identify TBs on H&E-stained histopathology images. Our study also demonstrates the value of adapting the foundation model for pathology image segmentation tasks.

Abstract 6177: Machine learning enables prediction of ADC targets from whole slide H&E images

Abstract Background: The efficacy of antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) depends on the expression and specificity of the target antigen by tumor cells. Although H&E-stained slides are routinely collected during cancer care, specialized IHC staining is typically required to ascertain antigen expression. Such stains are not always available or readily deployed. The need to perform separate IHC tests for each candidate ADC may burden clinical labs and can hinder access to care in resource-limited settings. Here we develop an ensemble of machine learning models to accurately predict the expression of 166 distinct ADC targets directly from H&E images. Methods: For each ADC-targeted gene, patients with copy-number amplifications (CNAs) were identified from somatic whole exome sequencing. Genes differentially expressed in patients with CNAs were identified from bulk transcriptomics. For each gene, an expression signature was developed based on the expression levels of differentially upregulated genes. Next, whole-slide, H&E-stained histopathology images were embedded into a lower-dimensional representation via a transformer model trained with self-supervised learning. Neural networks were developed to predict a patient’s probability of having a CNA in an ADC-targeted gene, as indicated by an expression signature exceeding the p90. All evaluation metrics were ascertained by 5-fold cross-validation, with training and evaluation on independent patients. Results: For each of the 166 ADC-targeted genes, a median of 154 patients were found to harbor a CNA, and the expression signature included a median of 180 genes. In all cases, patients with CNAs had significantly higher expression signatures than those without. For predicting likely CNA status directly from H&E histopathology images, the mean AUROC was 0.888 (95% CI, 0.876-0.900) and the mean AUPRC was 0.571 (95% CI, 0.531-0.611). Among the 166 ADC-targeted genes, the AUROC exceeded 0.95 for 31.3%, 0.8 for 80.7%, and 0.725 for 100%. The best-predicted ADC target was SLC7A5 (AUROC: 0.995 [95% CI, 0.994-0.998]; AUPRC: 0.967 [95% CI, 0.963-0.976]). Conclusion: We have developed models that accurately predict the likely expression of ADC targets based solely on H&E images. The ability to accurately discern the presence of ADC antigens from H&E images has numerous potential applications, including cohort refinement, computer-aided diagnosis, and personalized treatment planning. Citation Format: Zachary Ryan McCaw, Anna Shcherbina, Yajas Shah, insitro Research Team, Philip Tagari, Daphne Koller, Christopher Probert. Machine learning enables prediction of ADC targets from whole slide H&E images [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2024; Part 1 (Regular Abstracts); 2024 Apr 5-10; San Diego, CA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2024;84(6_Suppl):Abstract nr 6177.

Colorectal cancer histopathology image analysis: A comparative study of prognostic values of automatically extracted morphometric nuclear features in multispectral and red-blue-green imagery.

Multispectral imaging (MSI) has been utilized to predict the prognosis of colorectal cancer (CRC) patients, however, our understanding of the prognostic value of nuclear morphological parameters of bright-field MSI in CRC is still limited. This study was designed to compare the efficiency of MSI and standard red-green-blue (RGB) images in predicting the prognosis of CRC. We compared the efficiency of MS and conventional RGB images on the quantitative assessment of hematoxylin-eosin (HE) stained histopathology images. A pipeline was developed using a pixel-wise support vector machine (SVM) classifier for gland-stroma segmentation, and a marker-controlled watershed algorithm was used for nuclei segmentation. The correlation between extracted morphological parameters and the five-year disease-free survival (5-DFS) was analyzed. Forty-seven nuclear morphological parameters were extracted in total. Based on Kaplan-Meier analysis, eight features derived from MS images and seven featured derived from RGB images were significantly associated with 5-DFS, respectively. Compared with RGB images, MSI showed higher accuracy, precision, and Dice index in nuclei segmentation. Multivariate analysis indicated that both integrated parameters 1 (factors negatively correlated with CRC prognosis including nuclear number, circularity, eccentricity, major axis length) and 2 (factors positively correlated with CRC prognosis including nuclear average area, area perimeter, total area/total perimeter ratio, average area/perimeter ratio) in MS images were independent prognostic factors of 5-DFS, in contrast with only integrated parameter 1 (P<0.001) in RGB images. More importantly, the quantification of HE-stained MS images displayed higher accuracy in predicting 5-DFS compared with RGB images (76.9% vs 70.9%). Quantitative evaluation of HE-stained MS images could yield more information and better predictive performance for CRC prognosis than conventional RGB images, thereby contributing to precision oncology.

Interpretable deep learning model to predict lymph node metastasis in early gastric cancer using whole slide images.

In early gastric cancer (EGC), the presence of lymph node metastasis (LNM) is a crucial factor for determining the treatment options. Endoscopic resection is used for treatment of EGC with minimal risk of LNM. However, owing to the lack of definitive criteria for identifying patients who require additional surgery, some patients undergo unnecessary additional surgery. Considering that histopathologic patterns are significant factor for predicting lymph node metastasis in gastric cancer, we aimed to develop a machine learning algorithm which can predict LNM status using hematoxylin and eosin (H&E)-stained images. The images were obtained from several institutions. Our pipeline comprised two sequential approaches including a feature extractor and a risk classifier. For the feature extractor, a segmentation network (DeepLabV3+) was trained on 243 WSIs across three datasets to differentiate each histological subtype. The risk classifier was trained with XGBoost using 70 morphological features inferred from the trained feature extractor. The trained segmentation network, the feature extractor, achieved high performance, with pixel accuracies of 0.9348 and 0.8939 for the internal and external datasets in patch level, respectively. The risk classifier achieved an overall AUC of 0.75 in predicting LNM status. Remarkably, one of the datasets also showed a promising result with an AUC of 0.92. This is the first multi-institution study to develop machine learning algorithm for predicting LNM status in patients with EGC using H&E-stained histopathology images. Our findings have the potential to improve the selection of patients who require surgery among those with EGC showing high-risk histological features.

DETisSeg: A dual-encoder network for tissue semantic segmentation of histopathology image

Accurate segmentation of tissue regions in hematoxylin and eosin (H&E)-stained histopathology images is an essential step in computational pathology. It is still a challenging task due to the large-scale distribution, irregular morphological variations, and fuzzy boundaries between different tissues. Semantic segmentation methods with strong feature representative capability for extracting local fine-grained and global coarse-grained features are desired to tackle this challenge. In this paper, we propose a dual encoder network for tissue semantic segmentation of histopathology image, called DETisSeg, which aims to fully fuse the features of global context information by the Swin Transformer branch and local features by the convolutional neural network(CNN) branch. Particularly, we design an improved residual connection to recover the lost spatial information during the patch merging phase in the Swin Transformer branch. In addition, we employ a pyramid architecture decoder to generate a composite feature map with multiple scales. We perform experiments on two publicly available tissue semantic segmentation datasets, including the BCSS and LAUD-HistoSeg datasets, to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed DETisSeg. Compared with eight state-of-the-art semantic segmentation methods, the results show that the proposed DETisSeg achieves improved performance. Particularly, it outperforms Swin transformer on the mean Dice and IoU with improvements of 1.36% and 1.79% on BCSS dataset, 0.96% and 4.48% on LUAD-HistoSeg dataset, respectively.

Invasion depth estimation of carcinoma cells using adaptive stain normalization to improve epidermis segmentation accuracy.

Submucosal invasion depth is a significant prognostic factor when assessing lymph node metastasis and cancer itself to plan proper treatment for the patient. Conventionally, oncologists measure the invasion depth by hand which is a laborious, subjective, and time-consuming process. The manual pathological examination by measuring accurate carcinoma cell invasion with considerable inter-observer and intra-observer variations is still challenging. The increasing use of medical imaging and artificial intelligence reveals a significant role in clinical medicine and pathology. In this paper, we propose an approach to study invasive behavior and measure the invasion depth of carcinoma from stained histopathology images. Specifically, our model includes adaptive stain normalization, color decomposition, and morphological reconstruction with adaptive thresholding to separate the epithelium with blue ratio image. Our method splits the image into multiple non-overlapping meaningful segments and successfully finds the homogeneous segments to measure accurate invasion depth. The invasion depths are measured from the inner epithelium edge to outermost pixels of the deepest part of particles in image. We conduct our experiments on skin melanoma tissue samples as well as on organotypic invasion model utilizing myoma tissue and oral squamous cell carcinoma. The performance is experimentally compared to three closely related reference methods and our method provides a superior result in measuring invasion depth. This computational technique will be beneficial for the segmentation of epithelium and other particles for the development of novel computer-aided diagnostic tools in biobank applications.

MIU-Net: MIX-Attention and Inception U-Net for Histopathology Image Nuclei Segmentation

In the medical field, hematoxylin and eosin (H&amp;E)-stained histopathology images of cell nuclei analysis represent an important measure for cancer diagnosis. The most valuable aspect of the nuclei analysis is the segmentation of the different nuclei morphologies of different organs and subsequent diagnosis of the type and severity of the disease based on pathology. In recent years, deep learning techniques have been widely used in digital histopathology analysis. Automated nuclear segmentation technology enables the rapid and efficient segmentation of tens of thousands of complex and variable nuclei in histopathology images. However, a challenging problem during nuclei segmentation is the blocking of cell nuclei, overlapping, and background complexity of the tissue fraction. To address this challenge, we present MIU-net, an efficient deep learning network structure for the nuclei segmentation of histopathology images. Our proposed structure includes two blocks with modified inception module and attention module. The advantage of the modified inception module is to balance the computation and network performance of the deeper layers of the network, combined with the convolutional layer using different sizes of kernels to learn effective features in a fast and efficient manner to complete kernel segmentation. The attention module allows us to extract small and fine irregular boundary features from the images, which can better segment cancer cells that appear disorganized and fragmented. We test our methodology on public kumar datasets and achieve the highest AUC score of 0.92. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves better performance than other state-of-the-art methods.

Multilevel Multiobjective Particle Swarm Optimization Guided Superpixel Algorithm for Histopathology Image Detection and Segmentation.

Histopathology image analysis is considered as a gold standard for the early diagnosis of serious diseases such as cancer. The advancements in the field of computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) have led to the development of several algorithms for accurately segmenting histopathology images. However, the application of swarm intelligence for segmenting histopathology images is less explored. In this study, we introduce a Multilevel Multiobjective Particle Swarm Optimization guided Superpixel algorithm (MMPSO-S) for the effective detection and segmentation of various regions of interest (ROIs) from Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E)-stained histopathology images. Several experiments are conducted on four different datasets such as TNBC, MoNuSeg, MoNuSAC, and LD to ascertain the performance of the proposed algorithm. For the TNBC dataset, the algorithm achieves a Jaccard coefficient of 0.49, a Dice coefficient of 0.65, and an F-measure of 0.65. For the MoNuSeg dataset, the algorithm achieves a Jaccard coefficient of 0.56, a Dice coefficient of 0.72, and an F-measure of 0.72. Finally, for the LD dataset, the algorithm achieves a precision of 0.96, a recall of 0.99, and an F-measure of 0.98. The comparative results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over the simple Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm, its variants (Darwinian particle swarm optimization (DPSO), fractional order Darwinian particle swarm optimization (FODPSO)), Multiobjective Evolutionary Algorithm based on Decomposition (MOEA/D), non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm 2 (NSGA2), and other state-of-the-art traditional image processing methods.

An imbalance-aware nuclei segmentation methodology for H&E stained histopathology images

A key step in computational pathology is to automate the laborious process of manual nuclei segmentation in Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) stained whole slide images (WSIs). Despite lots of efforts put forward by the researchers to develop automated nuclei segmentation methodologies in the literature, the segmentation performance is still constrained due to several challenges, including overlapping and clumped nuclei, scanners with different resolutions and nuclei with varying sizes and shapes. In this paper, we introduce an imbalance-aware nuclei segmentation methodology to deal with class imbalance problems in H&E stained histopathology images. The introduced methodology involves the following improvements: (1) the design of a preprocessing stage with a variety of resize-split, augmentation and normalization techniques, and (2) an enhanced lightweight U-Net architecture with a generalized Dice loss layer. To prove its effectiveness and efficiency, a comprehensive experimental study is carried out on a well-known benchmark, namely the MonuSeg2018 dataset. According to the results, the proposed methodology outperforms various recently introduced studies in terms of well-known evaluation metrics, such as Aggregated Jaccard Index (AJI) and Intersection of Union (IoU).

Human Hepatocellular Carcinoma Classification from H&E Stained Histopathology Images with 3D Convolutional Neural Networks and Focal Loss Function.

This paper proposes a new Hepatocellular Carcinoma (HCC) classification method utilizing a hyperspectral imaging system (HSI) integrated with a light microscope. Using our custom imaging system, we have captured 270 bands of hyperspectral images of healthy and cancer tissue samples with HCC diagnosis from a liver microarray slide. Convolutional Neural Networks with 3D convolutions (3D-CNN) have been used to build an accurate classification model. With the help of 3D convolutions, spectral and spatial features within the hyperspectral cube are incorporated to train a strong classifier. Unlike 2D convolutions, 3D convolutions take the spectral dimension into account while automatically collecting distinctive features during the CNN training stage. As a result, we have avoided manual feature engineering on hyperspectral data and proposed a compact method for HSI medical applications. Moreover, the focal loss function, utilized as a CNN cost function, enables our model to tackle the class imbalance problem residing in the dataset effectively. The focal loss function emphasizes the hard examples to learn and prevents overfitting due to the lack of inter-class balancing. Our empirical results demonstrate the superiority of hyperspectral data over RGB data for liver cancer tissue classification. We have observed that increased spectral dimension results in higher classification accuracy. Both spectral and spatial features are essential in training an accurate learner for cancer tissue classification.

Deep learning-based image analysis predicts PD-L1 status from H&E-stained histopathology images in breast cancer

Programmed death ligand-1 (PD-L1) has been recently adopted for breast cancer as a predictive biomarker for immunotherapies. The cost, time, and variability of PD-L1 quantification by immunohistochemistry (IHC) are a challenge. In contrast, hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) is a robust staining used routinely for cancer diagnosis. Here, we show that PD-L1 expression can be predicted from H&E-stained images by employing state-of-the-art deep learning techniques. With the help of two expert pathologists and a designed annotation software, we construct a dataset to assess the feasibility of PD-L1 prediction from H&E in breast cancer. In a cohort of 3,376 patients, our system predicts the PD-L1 status in a high area under the curve (AUC) of 0.91 – 0.93. Our system is validated on two external datasets, including an independent clinical trial cohort, showing consistent prediction performance. Furthermore, the proposed system predicts which cases are prone to pathologists miss-interpretation, showing it can serve as a decision support and quality assurance system in clinical practice.

Colour adaptive generative networks for stain normalisation of histopathology images.

Deep learning has shown its effectiveness in histopathology image analysis, such as pathology detection and classification. However, stain colour variation in Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) stained histopathology images poses challenges in effectively training deep learning-based algorithms. To alleviate this problem, stain normalisation methods have been proposed, with most of the recent methods utilising generative adversarial networks (GAN). However, these methods are either trained fully with paired images from the target domain (supervised) or with unpaired images (unsupervised), suffering from either large discrepancy between domains or risks of undertrained/overfitted models when only the target domain images are used for training. In this paper, we introduce a colour adaptive generative network (CAGAN) for stain normalisation which combines both supervised learning from target domain and unsupervised learning from source domain. Specifically, we propose a dual-decoder generator and force consistency between their outputs thus introducing extra supervision which benefits from extra training with source domain images. Moreover, our model is immutable to stain colour variations due to the use of stain colour augmentation. We further implement histogram loss to ensure the processed images are coloured with the target domain colours regardless of their content differences. Extensive experiments on four public histopathology image datasets including TCGA-IDH, CAMELYON16, CAMELYON17 and BreakHis demonstrate that our proposed method produces high quality stain normalised images which improve the performance of benchmark algorithms by 5% to 10% compared to baselines not using normalisation.

NIMG-60. PREDICTING OVERALL SURVIVAL IN GLIOBLASTOMA USING HISTOPATHOLOGY VIA AN END-TO-END DEEP LEARNING PIPELINE: A LARGE MULTI-COHORT STUDY

Abstract PURPOSE Glioblastoma is an aggressive and universally fatal tumor. Morphological information as captured from cellular regions on surgically resected histopathology slides has the ability to reveal the inherent heterogeneity in Glioblastoma and thus has prognostic implications. In this work, we hypothesized that capturing morphological attributes from high cellularity regions on Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&amp;E)-stained digitized tissue slides using an end-to-end deep-learning pipeline will enable risk-stratification of GBM tumors based on overall survival. METHODS A large multi-cohort study consisting of N=514 H&amp;E-stained digitized tissue slides along with overall-survival data (OS) was obtained from the Ivy Glioblastoma atlas project (Ivy-GAP (N=41)), TCGA (N=379), and CPTAC (N=94). Our deep-learning pipeline consisted of two stages. First stage involved segmenting cellular tumor (CT) from necrotic-regions and background using Resnet-18 model, while the second stage involved predicting OS, using only the segmented CT regions identified in the first stage. For the segmentation stage, we leveraged the Ivy-GAP cohort, where CT annotations confirmed by expert neuropathologists were available, to serve as the training set. Using this training model, the CT regions on the remaining cohort (TCGA, CPTAC) (i.e. test set) were identified. For the survival-prediction stage, the last layer of ResNet18 model was replaced with a cox layer (ResNet-Cox), and further fine-tuned using OS and censor information. Independent validation of ResNet-Cox was performed on two hold-out sites from TCGA and one from CPTAC. RESULTS Our segmentation model achieved an accuracy of 0.89 in reliably identifying CT regions on the validation data. The segmented CT regions on the test cohort were further confirmed by two experts. Our ResNet-Cox model achieved a concordance-index of 0.73 on MD Anderson Cancer Center (N=60), 0.71 on Henry Ford Hospital (N=96), and 0.68 on CPTAC data (N=41). CONCLUSION Deep-learning features captured from cellular tumor of H&amp;E-stained histopathology images may predict survival in Glioblastoma.

A Semi-supervised Learning for Segmentation of Gigapixel Histopathology Images from Brain Tissues.

Automated segmentation of grey matter (GM) and white matter (WM) in gigapixel histopathology images is advantageous to analyzing distributions of disease pathologies, further aiding in neuropathologic deep phenotyping. Although supervised deep learning methods have shown good performance, its requirement of a large amount of labeled data may not be cost-effective for large scale projects. In the case of GM/WM segmentation, trained experts need to carefully trace the delineation in gigapixel images. To minimize manual labeling, we consider semi-surprised learning (SSL) and deploy one state-of-the-art SSL method (FixMatch) on WSIs. Then we propose a two-stage scheme to further improve the performance of SSL: the first stage is a self-supervised module to train an encoder to learn the visual representations of unlabeled data, subsequently, this well-trained encoder will be an initialization of consistency loss-based SSL in the second stage. We test our method on Amyloid-β stained histopathology images and the results outperform FixMatch with the mean IoU score at around 2% by using 6,000 labeled tiles while over 10% by using only 600 labeled tiles from 2 WSIs.Clinical relevance- this work minimizes the required labeling efforts by trained personnel. An improved GM/WM segmentation method could further aid in the study of brain diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease.

P68.03 An AI Workflow to Detect and Report Tumor Cell Proportion of H&E-Stained Tissue Samples

Before performing NGS-based genetic testing for lung cancer tissues, H&E-stained histopathology image reading by a specialized pathologist is usually required to ensure that sample quality can meet sequencing requirements, that is, the minimum threshold for the number of cells in the suspected tumor region. With the great progress of AI algorithms in processing digital images, it has become possible to automate the quality assessment of lung cancer histopathology slides using AI algorithms. We curated a dataset containing 357 H&E-stained histopathology images of lung cancer, in which the tumor regions were labeled by a professional pathologist. The dataset was randomly divided into a training set containing 307 images and a test set of 50 images. The deep learning algorithm was trained on the training set and its performance was evaluated on the test set. The predicted regions output by the algorithm were further quantified and compared with the pathologist's quality assessment report of the slides. The tumor region segmentation performed by the deep learning algorithm achieved an iou of 0.7 on the test set. The correlation between the quantified results of the algorithm's predicted tumor region and the pathologist's slide quality report reached 0.52. The deep learning algorithm has good performance for the lung cancer tumor region segmentation after training on a certain amount of data. The strong correlation between the segmented regions output by the algorithm and the pathologist's slide quality report indicates that automated lung cancer tissue quality assessment using AI algorithms has great potential in the future. The model still has much room for improvement due to the morphological diversity of lung cancer tissue sections and the relatively low quality of the dataset.

Efficient deep learning architecture with dimension-wise pyramid pooling for nuclei segmentation of histopathology images

Image segmentation remains to be one of the most vital tasks in the area of computer vision and more so in the case of medical image processing. Image segmentation quality is the main metric that is often considered with memory and computation efficiency overlooked, limiting the use of power hungry models for practical use. In this paper, we propose a novel framework (Kidney-SegNet) that combines the effectiveness of an attention based encoder-decoder architecture with atrous spatial pyramid pooling with highly efficient dimension-wise convolutions. The segmentation results of the proposed Kidney-SegNet architecture have been shown to outperform existing state-of-the-art deep learning methods by evaluating them on two publicly available kidney and TNBC breast H&E stained histopathology image datasets. Further, our simulation experiments also reveal that the computational complexity and memory requirement of our proposed architecture is very efficient compared to existing deep learning state-of-the-art methods for the task of nuclei segmentation of H&E stained histopathology images. The source code of our implementation will be available at https://github.com/Aaatresh/Kidney-SegNet.

MASG-GAN: A multi-view attention superpixel-guided generative adversarial network for efficient and simultaneous histopathology image segmentation and classification

Efficient analysis of Haematoxylin and Eosin stained histopathology images has become a challenge in digital pathology work-flow. We propose a Multi-view Attention Superpixel-guided Generative Adversarial Network (MASG-GAN) to achieve the multi-task learning for nuclei segmentation and benign-malignant tissue classification. Firstly, a novel superpixel segmentation approach driven by Bounded Asymmetric Gaussian Mixture Model (BAGMM) is presented for generating superpixel-prior probability map with high-level semantics. Then, we develop a generator network that integrates student-branch and teacher-branch. Concretely, the teacher-branch takes superpixel-prior probability map as input and guides the student-branch for accurate segmentation and classification. Then in generator, we build a light-weight U-shaped block (LUB) that consists of depthwise separable convolutions with mini encoding-decoding structure to reduce network computational cost. Finally, a Multi-view Attention Module (MVAM) is designed for further enhance the segmentation quality of nuclei with small area and unclear boundary. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that our pipeline outperforms some state-of-the-art methods, especially in terms of efficiency.

An SVM approach towards breast cancer classification from H&E-stained histopathology images based on integrated features.

Breast cancer is one among the most frequent reasons of women's death worldwide. Nowadays, healthcare informatics is mainly focussing on the classification of breast cancer images, due to the lethal nature of this cancer. There are chances of inter- and intra-observer variability that may lead to misdiagnosis in the detection of cancer. This study proposed an automatic breast cancer classification system that uses support vector machine (SVM) classifier based on integrated features (texture, geometrical, and color). The University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) dataset and BreakHis dataset, which are available in public domain, were used. A classification comparison module which involves SVM, k-nearest neighbor (k-NN), random forest (RF), and artificial neural network (ANN) was also proposed to determine the classifier that best suits for the application of breast cancer detection from histopathology images. The performance of these classifiers was analyzed against metrics like accuracy, specificity, sensitivity, balanced accuracy, and F-score. Results showed that among the classifiers, the SVM classifier performed better with a test accuracy of approximately 90% on both the datasets. Additionally, the significance of the proposed integrated SVM model was statistically analyzed against other classifier models.

Automated immunostaining-free prediction of breast carcinoma ER and PR status, Ki67 count, patient therapy stratification index and quantification of prognostic quiescence burden in TNBC from pretreatment H&amp;E stained histopathology images in breast cancer.

e12535 Background: Categorical combinations of ER, PR, HER2, and Ki67 levels are traditionally used to classify patients into luminal A and B-like subtypes in order to inform treatment choice. Accounting for nearly 70% of all breast malignancies, luminal cancer is heterogeneous, harboring subtypes with distinct molecular profiles and clinical outcomes. Although most patients with luminal-type disease respond well to endocrine therapy alone, some develop recurrences benefiting from additional cytotoxic therapy. Identifying such cases a priori remains a challenge but would enable patients to be spared the debilitating side-effects of ineffective chemotherapy. In this regard, the efficacy of chemotherapy and disease recurrence relate to (i) ER driven G1/S perturbations and/or (ii) quiescent cell populations arrested in the G0/G1 phase of cell cycle. This study aimed to develop a histopathology whole slide image (WSI)-based, low cost, rapid and automated approach to: (i) predict ER/PR/Ki67 status, (ii) quantify quiescence burden, (iii) develop a G1/S-based patient stratification system for luminal A/B patients, and (iv) achieve a quiescence burden-based stratification of TNBC patients. Methods: This investigation centered on the initial clinical validation of a novel, immunostaining-free technology which uses information extracted from pre-treatment hematoxylin and eosin (H&amp;E) stained slide WSIs alone to achieve these aims. Unlike conventional artificial intelligence-based approaches, the underlying proprietary algorithm and its prediction criteria are based on deterministic, hard-coded observational relationships of continuous scales drawn from WSI morphological features. In this instance, these represent tumor-related biological pathway disruptions and mitotic checkpoint perturbations, where G1/S perturbations enable luminal subtype stratification, and G0/G1 perturbations reflect quiescence burden. Back projecting the algorithm’s quiescence burden output on to the original WSIs enables morphological patterns to be mapped to quiescence burden.