Weakly supervised learning for multi-organ adenocarcinoma classification in whole slide images

PLoS One. 2022 Nov 23;17(11):e0275378. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0275378. eCollection 2022.

Abstract

The primary screening by automated computational pathology algorithms of the presence or absence of adenocarcinoma in biopsy specimens (e.g., endoscopic biopsy, transbronchial lung biopsy, and needle biopsy) of possible primary organs (e.g., stomach, colon, lung, and breast) and radical lymph node dissection specimen is very useful and should be a powerful tool to assist surgical pathologists in routine histopathological diagnostic workflow. In this paper, we trained multi-organ deep learning models to classify adenocarcinoma in biopsy and radical lymph node dissection specimens whole slide images (WSIs). We evaluated the models on five independent test sets (stomach, colon, lung, breast, lymph nodes) to demonstrate the feasibility in multi-organ and lymph nodes specimens from different medical institutions, achieving receiver operating characteristic areas under the curves (ROC-AUCs) in the range of 0.91 -0.98.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Adenocarcinoma* / pathology
  • Algorithms
  • Breast / pathology
  • Humans
  • Lymph Nodes / pathology
  • Supervised Machine Learning

Grants and funding

This study is based on results obtained from a project, JPNP14012, subsidized by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO). The founder provided support in the form of salaries for authors M.T. and F.K, but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The specific roles of these authors are articulated in the ‘author contributions’ section.