Precision histology: how deep learning is poised to revitalize histomorphology for personalized cancer care

Lung cancer is the most prevalent cancer worldwide, and histopathological assessment is indispensable for its diagnosis. However, human evaluation of pathology slides cannot accurately predict patients' prognoses. In this study, we obtain 2,186 haematoxylin and eosin stained histopathology whole-slide images of lung adenocarcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma patients from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), and 294 additional images from Stanford Tissue Microarray (TMA) Database. We extract 9,879 quantitative image features and use regularized machine-learning methods to select the top features and to distinguish shorter-term survivors from longer-term survivors with stage I adenocarcinoma (P<0.003) or squamous cell carcinoma (P=0.023) in the TCGA data set. We validate the survival prediction framework with the TMA cohort (P<0.036 for both tumour types). Our results suggest that automatically derived image features can predict the prognosis of lung cancer patients and thereby contribute to precision oncology. Our methods are extensible to histopathology images of other organs.

Pathologists face a substantial increase in workload and complexity of histopathologic cancer diagnosis due to the advent of personalized medicine. Therefore, diagnostic protocols have to focus equally on efficiency and accuracy. In this paper we introduce ‘deep learning’ as a technique to improve the objectivity and efficiency of histopathologic slide analysis. Through two examples, prostate cancer identification in biopsy specimens and breast cancer metastasis detection in sentinel lymph nodes, we show the potential of this new methodology to reduce the workload for pathologists, while at the same time increasing objectivity of diagnoses. We found that all slides containing prostate cancer and micro- and macro-metastases of breast cancer could be identified automatically while 30–40% of the slides containing benign and normal tissue could be excluded without the use of any additional immunohistochemical markers or human intervention. We conclude that ‘deep learning’ holds great promise to improve the efficacy of prostate cancer diagnosis and breast cancer staging.