Yani Wei

Yongquan Yang, Fengling Li, Yani Wei et al.

In breast cancer, neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) provides a standard treatment option for patients who have locally advanced cancer and some large operable tumors. A patient will have better prognosis when he has achieved a pathological complete response (pCR) with the treatment of NAC. There has been a trend to directly predict pCR to NAC from histological images based on deep learning (DL). However, the DL-based predictive models numerically have better performances in internal validation than in external validation. In this paper, we aim to alleviate this situation with an intrinsic approach. We propose an experts' cognition-driven ensemble deep learning (ECDEDL) approach. Taking the cognition of both pathology and artificial intelligence experts into consideration to improve the generalization of the predictive model to the external validation, ECDEDL can intrinsically approximate the working paradigm of a human being which will refer to his various working experiences to make decisions. ECDEDL was validated with 695 WSIs collected from the same center as the primary dataset to develop the predictive model and perform the internal validation, and was also validated with 340 WSIs collected from other three centers as the external dataset to perform the external validation. In external validation, ECDEDL improves the AUCs of pCR prediction from 61.52(59.80-63.26) to 67.75(66.74-68.80) and the Accuracies of pCR prediction from 56.09(49.39-62.79) to 71.01(69.44-72.58). ECDEDL was quite effective for external validation of predicting pCR to NAC from histological images in breast cancer, numerically approximating the internal validation.

Jiawen Li, Qiehe Sun, Renao Yan et al. · tsinghua

With the development of digital imaging in medical microscopy, artificial intelligent-based analysis of pathological whole slide images (WSIs) provides a powerful tool for cancer diagnosis. Limited by the expensive cost of pixel-level annotation, current research primarily focuses on representation learning with slide-level labels, showing success in various downstream tasks. However, given the diversity of lesion types and the complex relationships between each other, these techniques still deserve further exploration in addressing advanced pathology tasks. To this end, we introduce the concept of hierarchical pathological image classification and propose a representation learning called PathTree. PathTree considers the multi-classification of diseases as a binary tree structure. Each category is represented as a professional pathological text description, which messages information with a tree-like encoder. The interactive text features are then used to guide the aggregation of hierarchical multiple representations. PathTree uses slide-text similarity to obtain probability scores and introduces two extra tree specific losses to further constrain the association between texts and slides. Through extensive experiments on three challenging hierarchical classification datasets: in-house cryosectioned lung tissue lesion identification, public prostate cancer grade assessment, and public breast cancer subtyping, our proposed PathTree is consistently competitive compared to the state-of-the-art methods and provides a new perspective on the deep learning-assisted solution for more complex WSI classification.