Computer-Assisted Diagnosis of Lymph Node Metastases in Colorectal Cancers Using Transfer Learning With an Ensemble Model

Amjad Khan, Nelleke Brouwer, Annika Blank, Felix Müller, Davide Soldini, Aurelia Noske, Elisabeth Gaus, Simone Brandt, Iris Nagtegaal, Heather Dawson, Jean Philippe Thiran, Aurel Perren, Alessandro Lugli, Inti Zlobec

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

26 Scopus citations

Abstract

Screening of lymph node metastases in colorectal cancer (CRC) can be a cumbersome task, but it is amenable to artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted diagnostic solution. Here, we propose a deep learning–based workflow for the evaluation of CRC lymph node metastases from digitized hematoxylin and eosin–stained sections. A segmentation model was trained on 100 whole-slide images (WSIs). It achieved a Matthews correlation coefficient of 0.86 (±0.154) and an acceptable Hausdorff distance of 135.59 μm (±72.14 μm), indicating a high congruence with the ground truth. For metastasis detection, 2 models (Xception and Vision Transformer) were independently trained first on a patch-based breast cancer lymph node data set and were then fine-tuned using the CRC data set. After fine-tuning, the ensemble model showed significant improvements in the F1 score (0.797-0.949; P <.00001) and the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (0.959-0.978; P <.00001). Four independent cohorts (3 internal and 1 external) of CRC lymph nodes were used for validation in cascading segmentation and metastasis detection models. Our approach showed excellent performance, with high sensitivity (0.995, 1.0) and specificity (0.967, 1.0) in 2 validation cohorts of adenocarcinoma cases (n = 3836 slides) when comparing slide-level labels with the ground truth (pathologist reports). Similarly, an acceptable performance was achieved in a validation cohort (n = 172 slides) with mucinous and signet-ring cell histology (sensitivity, 0.872; specificity, 0.936). The patch-based classification confidence was aggregated to overlay the potential metastatic regions within each lymph node slide for visualization. We also applied our method to a consecutive case series of lymph nodes obtained over the past 6 months at our institution (n = 217 slides). The overlays of prediction within lymph node regions matched 100% when compared with a microscope evaluation by an expert pathologist. Our results provide the basis for a computer-assisted diagnostic tool for easy and efficient lymph node screening in patients with CRC.

Original languageEnglish
Article number100118
JournalModern Pathology
Volume36
Issue number5
DOIs
StatePublished - May 2023

Keywords

  • colorectal cancer
  • ensemble model
  • histopathology
  • lymph nodes
  • metastasis detection
  • transfer learning

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