MIDL 2021, L4, Weitz et. al., Short Oral
Channel: MIDL Society
Date: 06/08/2021

L4 - Prediction of Ki67 scores from H&E stained breast cancer sections using convolutional neural networks

Philippe Weitz, Balazs Acs, Johan Hartman, Mattias Rantalainen

Conference page: https://2021.midl.io/papers/L4

Abstract: Ki67 is an established marker of proliferation in breast cancer, but currently has limited clinical value due to limitations of the analytical validity of immunohistochemistry (IHC) -based Ki67 scoring. While the inter-assessor variability of scoring can be improved through image analysis software, Ki67 IHC also suffers from a lack of standardized staining protocols and is not part of routine pathology workflow in most countries. This could potentially be alleviated through directly predicting Ki67 scores from routine hematoxylin and eosin (H\&E) stained whole-slide-images (WSIs). We compared four different deep learning based approaches to  predict Ki67 scores from routine H\&E stained WSIs in a dataset that consists of matched H\&E and Ki67 WSIs from 126 breast cancer patients, resulting in a Spearman correlation between WSI cancer ROI averages of 0.546 for the best performing model in a 5-fold cross-validation (CV). These findings suggest that it is possible to predict the Ki67 score from H\&E stained WSIs, but validation in a larger cohort is required to meaningfully distinguish the performance of the methods that were investigated."