Evaluation of automatic discrimination between benign and malignant prostate tissue in the era of high precision digital pathology

  • Background: Prostate cancer is a major health concern in aging men. Paralleling an aging society, prostate cancer prevalence increases emphasizing the need for efcient diagnostic algorithms. Methods: Retrospectively, 106 prostate tissue samples from 48 patients (mean age, 66 ± 6.6 years) were included in the study. Patients sufered from prostate cancer (n = 38) or benign prostatic hyperplasia (n = 10) and were treated with radical prostatectomy or Holmium laser enucleation of the prostate, respectively. We constructed tissue microarrays (TMAs) comprising representative malignant (n = 38) and benign (n = 68) tissue cores. TMAs were processed to histological slides, stained, digitized and assessed for the applicability of machine learning strategies and open–source tools in diagnosis of prostate cancer. We applied the software QuPath to extract features for shape, stain intensity, and texture of TMA cores for three stainings, H&E, ERG, and PIN-4. Three machine learning algorithms, neural network (NN), support vector machines (SVM), and random forest (RF), were trained and cross-validated with 100 Monte Carlo random splits into 70% training set and 30% test set. We determined AUC values for single color channels, with and without optimization of hyperparameters by exhaustive grid search. We applied recursive feature elimination to feature sets of multiple color transforms. Results: Mean AUC was above 0.80. PIN-4 stainings yielded higher AUC than H&E and ERG. For PIN-4 with the color transform saturation, NN, RF, and SVM revealed AUC of 0.93 ± 0.04, 0.91 ± 0.06, and 0.92 ± 0.05, respectively. Optimization of hyperparameters improved the AUC only slightly by 0.01. For H&E, feature selection resulted in no increase of AUC but to an increase of 0.02–0.06 for ERG and PIN-4. Conclusions: Automated pipelines may be able to discriminate with high accuracy between malignant and benign tissue. We found PIN-4 staining best suited for classifcation. Further bioinformatic analysis of larger data sets would be crucial to evaluate the reliability of automated classifcation methods for clinical practice and to evaluate potential discrimination of aggressiveness of cancer to pave the way to automatic precision medicine.
Metadaten
Author:Yauheniya Zhdanovich, Jörg AckermannORCiDGND, Peter Johannes WildORCiDGND, Jens KöllermannORCiDGND, Katrin BankovORCiDGND, Claudia DöringORCiDGND, Nadine FlinnerORCiDGND, Henning ReisORCiDGND, Mike WenzelORCiDGND, Robert Benedikt HöhORCiDGND, Philipp MandelORCiDGND, Thomas J. VoglORCiDGND, Patrick Nikolaus HarterORCiDGND, Katharina Johanna FilipskiGND, Ina KochORCiD, Simon BernatzORCiDGND
URN:urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-752073
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1186/s12859-022-05124-9
ISSN:1471-2105
Parent Title (English):BMC bioinformatics
Publisher:BioMed Central ; Springer
Place of publication:London ; Berlin ; Heidelberg
Document Type:Article
Language:English
Date of Publication (online):2023/01/03
Date of first Publication:2023/01/03
Publishing Institution:Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg
Release Date:2024/07/15
Tag:Machine learning; Prediction; Prostate cancer; Quantitative features; Statistical analysis
Volume:24
Issue:art. 1
Article Number:1
Page Number:14
First Page:1
Last Page:14
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The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
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Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.
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Funding: LOEWE Center Frankfurt Cancer Institute (FCI) ; III L 5 - 519/03/03.001 - (0015)
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Funding: Frankfurt Research Funding (FFF) ; program Nachwuchswissenschaftler
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Gefördert durch den Open-Access-Publikationsfonds der Goethe-Universität
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Funding: Mildred-Scheel Founation ; Clinical Scientist Program
HeBIS-PPN:520902866
Institutes:Informatik und Mathematik
Medizin
Dewey Decimal Classification:0 Informatik, Informationswissenschaft, allgemeine Werke / 00 Informatik, Wissen, Systeme / 004 Datenverarbeitung; Informatik
6 Technik, Medizin, angewandte Wissenschaften / 61 Medizin und Gesundheit / 610 Medizin und Gesundheit
Sammlungen:Universitätspublikationen
Open-Access-Publikationsfonds:Medizin
Licence (German):License LogoCreative Commons - CC BY - Namensnennung 4.0 International