Transform Optimization for the Lossy Coding of Pathology Whole-Slide Images

Author(s):  
Miguel Hernandez-Cabronero ◽  
Francesc Auli-Llinas ◽  
Victor Sanchez ◽  
Joan Serra Sagrista

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (10) ◽  
pp. 64-1-64-5
Author(s):  
Mustafa I. Jaber ◽  
Christopher W. Szeto ◽  
Bing Song ◽  
Liudmila Beziaeva ◽  
Stephen C. Benz ◽  
...  

In this paper, we propose a patch-based system to classify non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) diagnostic whole slide images (WSIs) into two major histopathological subtypes: adenocarcinoma (LUAD) and squamous cell carcinoma (LUSC). Classifying patients accurately is important for prognosis and therapy decisions. The proposed system was trained and tested on 876 subtyped NSCLC gigapixel-resolution diagnostic WSIs from 805 patients – 664 in the training set and 141 in the test set. The algorithm has modules for: 1) auto-generated tumor/non-tumor masking using a trained residual neural network (ResNet34), 2) cell-density map generation (based on color deconvolution, local drain segmentation, and watershed transformation), 3) patch-level feature extraction using a pre-trained ResNet34, 4) a tower of linear SVMs for different cell ranges, and 5) a majority voting module for aggregating subtype predictions in unseen testing WSIs. The proposed system was trained and tested on several WSI magnifications ranging from x4 to x40 with a best ROC AUC of 0.95 and an accuracy of 0.86 in test samples. This fully-automated histopathology subtyping method outperforms similar published state-of-the-art methods for diagnostic WSIs.



Author(s):  
Liron Pantanowitz ◽  
Pamela Michelow ◽  
Scott Hazelhurst ◽  
Shivam Kalra ◽  
Charles Choi ◽  
...  

Context.— Pathologists may encounter extraneous pieces of tissue (tissue floaters) on glass slides because of specimen cross-contamination. Troubleshooting this problem, including performing molecular tests for tissue identification if available, is time consuming and often does not satisfactorily resolve the problem. Objective.— To demonstrate the feasibility of using an image search tool to resolve the tissue floater conundrum. Design.— A glass slide was produced containing 2 separate hematoxylin and eosin (H&E)-stained tissue floaters. This fabricated slide was digitized along with the 2 slides containing the original tumors used to create these floaters. These slides were then embedded into a dataset of 2325 whole slide images comprising a wide variety of H&E stained diagnostic entities. Digital slides were broken up into patches and the patch features converted into barcodes for indexing and easy retrieval. A deep learning-based image search tool was employed to extract features from patches via barcodes, hence enabling image matching to each tissue floater. Results.— There was a very high likelihood of finding a correct tumor match for the queried tissue floater when searching the digital database. Search results repeatedly yielded a correct match within the top 3 retrieved images. The retrieval accuracy improved when greater proportions of the floater were selected. The time to run a search was completed within several milliseconds. Conclusions.— Using an image search tool offers pathologists an additional method to rapidly resolve the tissue floater conundrum, especially for those laboratories that have transitioned to going fully digital for primary diagnosis.



2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaodong Wang ◽  
Ying Chen ◽  
Yunshu Gao ◽  
Huiqing Zhang ◽  
Zehui Guan ◽  
...  

AbstractN-staging is a determining factor for prognostic assessment and decision-making for stage-based cancer therapeutic strategies. Visual inspection of whole-slides of intact lymph nodes is currently the main method used by pathologists to calculate the number of metastatic lymph nodes (MLNs). Moreover, even at the same N stage, the outcome of patients varies dramatically. Here, we propose a deep-learning framework for analyzing lymph node whole-slide images (WSIs) to identify lymph nodes and tumor regions, and then to uncover tumor-area-to-MLN-area ratio (T/MLN). After training, our model’s tumor detection performance was comparable to that of experienced pathologists and achieved similar performance on two independent gastric cancer validation cohorts. Further, we demonstrate that T/MLN is an interpretable independent prognostic factor. These findings indicate that deep-learning models could assist not only pathologists in detecting lymph nodes with metastases but also oncologists in exploring new prognostic factors, especially those that are difficult to calculate manually.



Cancers ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (6) ◽  
pp. 1325
Author(s):  
Abhisek Ghosh ◽  
Korsuk Sirinukunwattana ◽  
Nasullah Khalid Alham ◽  
Lisa Browning ◽  
Richard Colling ◽  
...  

Testicular cancer is the most common cancer in men aged from 15 to 34 years. Lymphovascular invasion refers to the presence of tumours within endothelial-lined lymphatic or vascular channels, and has been shown to have prognostic significance in testicular germ cell tumours. In non-seminomatous tumours, lymphovascular invasion is the most powerful prognostic factor for stage 1 disease. For the pathologist, searching multiple slides for lymphovascular invasion can be highly time-consuming. The aim of this retrospective study was to develop and assess an artificial intelligence algorithm that can identify areas suspicious for lymphovascular invasion in histological digital whole slide images. Areas of possible lymphovascular invasion were annotated in a total of 184 whole slide images of haematoxylin and eosin (H&E) stained tissue from 19 patients with testicular germ cell tumours, including a mixture of seminoma and non-seminomatous cases. Following consensus review by specialist uropathologists, we trained a deep learning classifier for automatic segmentation of areas suspicious for lymphovascular invasion. The classifier identified 34 areas within a validation set of 118 whole slide images from 10 patients, each of which was reviewed by three expert pathologists to form a majority consensus. The precision was 0.68 for areas which were considered to be appropriate to flag, and 0.56 for areas considered to be definite lymphovascular invasion. An artificial intelligence tool which highlights areas of possible lymphovascular invasion to reporting pathologists, who then make a final judgement on its presence or absence, has been demonstrated as feasible in this proof-of-concept study. Further development is required before clinical deployment.



2021 ◽  
pp. 019262332098325
Author(s):  
Alys E. Bradley ◽  
Maurice G. Cary ◽  
Kaori Isobe ◽  
Stuart Naylor ◽  
Stephen Drew

This Proof of Concept (POC) study was to assess whether assessment of whole slide images (WSI) of the 2 target tissues for a contemporaneous peer review can elicit concordant results to the findings generated by the Study Pathologist from the glass slides. Well-focused WSI of liver and spleen from 4 groups of mice, that had previously been diagnosed to be the target tissues by an experienced veterinary toxicologic pathologist examining glass slides, were independently reviewed by 3 veterinary pathologists with varying experience in assessment of WSIs. Diagnostic discrepancies were then reviewed by an experienced adjudicating pathologist. Assessment of microscopic findings using WSI showed concordance with the glass slides, with only slight discrepancy in severity grades noted. None of the lesions recorded by the Study pathologist were “missed” and no lesions were added by the pathologists evaluating WSIs, thus demonstrating equivalence of the WSI to glass slides for this study.



2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 51
Author(s):  
Emanuela Paladini ◽  
Edoardo Vantaggiato ◽  
Fares Bougourzi ◽  
Cosimo Distante ◽  
Abdenour Hadid ◽  
...  

In recent years, automatic tissue phenotyping has attracted increasing interest in the Digital Pathology (DP) field. For Colorectal Cancer (CRC), tissue phenotyping can diagnose the cancer and differentiate between different cancer grades. The development of Whole Slide Images (WSIs) has provided the required data for creating automatic tissue phenotyping systems. In this paper, we study different hand-crafted feature-based and deep learning methods using two popular multi-classes CRC-tissue-type databases: Kather-CRC-2016 and CRC-TP. For the hand-crafted features, we use two texture descriptors (LPQ and BSIF) and their combination. In addition, two classifiers are used (SVM and NN) to classify the texture features into distinct CRC tissue types. For the deep learning methods, we evaluate four Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures (ResNet-101, ResNeXt-50, Inception-v3, and DenseNet-161). Moreover, we propose two Ensemble CNN approaches: Mean-Ensemble-CNN and NN-Ensemble-CNN. The experimental results show that the proposed approaches outperformed the hand-crafted feature-based methods, CNN architectures and the state-of-the-art methods in both databases.



2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Wurzel ◽  
Jörg Ackermann ◽  
Hendrik Schäfer ◽  
Sonja Scharf ◽  
Martin-Leo Hansmann ◽  
...  

Abstract Human lymph nodes play a central part of immune defense against infection agents and tumor cells. Lymphoid follicles are compartments of the lymph node which are spherical, mainly filled with B cells. B cells are cellular components of the adaptive immune systems. In the course of a specific immune response, lymphoid follicles pass different morphological differentiation stages. The morphology and the spatial distribution of lymphoid follicles can be sometimes associated to a particular causative agent and development stage of a disease. We report our new approach for the automatic detection of follicular regions in histological whole slide images of tissue sections immuno-stained with actin. The method is divided in two phases: (1) shock filter-based detection of transition points and (2) segmentation of follicular regions. Follicular regions in 10 whole slide images were manually annotated by visual inspection, and sample surveys were conducted by an expert pathologist. The results of our method were validated by comparing with the manual annotation. On average, we could achieve a Zijbendos similarity index of 0.71, with a standard deviation of 0.07.



2020 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 175883592097141
Author(s):  
Fan Zhang ◽  
Lian-Zhen Zhong ◽  
Xun Zhao ◽  
Di Dong ◽  
Ji-Jin Yao ◽  
...  

Background: To explore the prognostic value of radiomics-based and digital pathology-based imaging biomarkers from macroscopic magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and microscopic whole-slide images for patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC). Methods: We recruited 220 NPC patients and divided them into training ( n = 132), internal test ( n = 44), and external test ( n = 44) cohorts. The primary endpoint was failure-free survival (FFS). Radiomic features were extracted from pretreatment MRI and selected and integrated into a radiomic signature. The histopathological signature was extracted from whole-slide images of biopsy specimens using an end-to-end deep-learning method. Incorporating two signatures and independent clinical factors, a multi-scale nomogram was constructed. We also tested the correlation between the key imaging features and genetic alternations in an independent cohort of 16 patients (biological test cohort). Results: Both radiomic and histopathologic signatures presented significant associations with treatment failure in the three cohorts (C-index: 0.689–0.779, all p < 0.050). The multi-scale nomogram showed a consistent significant improvement for predicting treatment failure compared with the clinical model in the training (C-index: 0.817 versus 0.730, p < 0.050), internal test (C-index: 0.828 versus 0.602, p < 0.050) and external test (C-index: 0.834 versus 0.679, p < 0.050) cohorts. Furthermore, patients were stratified successfully into two groups with distinguishable prognosis (log-rank p < 0.0010) using our nomogram. We also found that two texture features were related to the genetic alternations of chromatin remodeling pathways in another independent cohort. Conclusion: The multi-scale imaging features showed a complementary value in prognostic prediction and may improve individualized treatment in NPC.



Cancers ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 11
Author(s):  
Rokshana Stephny Geread ◽  
Abishika Sivanandarajah ◽  
Emily Rita Brouwer ◽  
Geoffrey A. Wood ◽  
Dimitrios Androutsos ◽  
...  

In this work, a novel proliferation index (PI) calculator for Ki67 images called piNET is proposed. It is successfully tested on four datasets, from three scanners comprised of patches, tissue microarrays (TMAs) and whole slide images (WSI), representing a diverse multi-centre dataset for evaluating Ki67 quantification. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, piNET consistently performs the best over all datasets with an average PI difference of 5.603%, PI accuracy rate of 86% and correlation coefficient R = 0.927. The success of the system can be attributed to several innovations. Firstly, this tool is built based on deep learning, which can adapt to wide variability of medical images—and it was posed as a detection problem to mimic pathologists’ workflow which improves accuracy and efficiency. Secondly, the system is trained purely on tumor cells, which reduces false positives from non-tumor cells without needing the usual pre-requisite tumor segmentation step for Ki67 quantification. Thirdly, the concept of learning background regions through weak supervision is introduced, by providing the system with ideal and non-ideal (artifact) patches that further reduces false positives. Lastly, a novel hotspot analysis is proposed to allow automated methods to score patches from WSI that contain “significant” activity.



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