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Deep Learning Assessment of Tumor Proliferation in Histopathological Images for Categorical and Molecular Breast Cancer Severity Diagnosis

Booth Id:
CBIO045

Category:
Computational Biology and Bioinformatics

Year:
2017

Finalist Names:
Shah, Manan

Abstract:
The emergence of high-throughput histopathological images over the past decade provides new opportunities for computational techniques to study cancerous tumors. Current analysis of tumor proliferation, the most salient prognostic biomarker for invasive breast cancer, is limited to subjective mitosis counting by pathologists in localized regions of tissue images and fails to address additional features critical to holistic analysis. Objective reports require expensive molecular RNA expression tests which are cost-prohibitive in developing countries. This study presents the first data-driven integrative approach to characterize the severity of tumor growth and spread on a categorical and molecular level, utilizing multiple biologically salient deep learning classifiers to develop a comprehensive prognostic model. Our approach achieves pathologist level performance on three-class categorical tumor severity prediction in under two seconds. It additionally pioneers prediction of molecular expression data from a tissue image at a fraction of current cost, obtaining a Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient of 0.60 (p < 0.001) with ex vivo RNA molecular expression data. Furthermore, our novel framework identifies over 200 unprecedented biomarkers critical to the accurate assessment of tumor proliferation, validating our proposed integrative pipeline as the first to holistically and objectively analyze histopathological images. Our generalizable cost-effective model can be applied to diagnosis, prognosis, and identification of biomarkers associated with a wide range of cancerous diseases and phenotypes.

Awards Won:
Second Award of $2,000
Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence: Honorable Mention