John Le Quesne

Adalberto Claudio Quiros, Nicolas Coudray, Anna Yeaton et al.

Definitive cancer diagnosis and management depend upon the extraction of information from microscopy images by pathologists. These images contain complex information requiring time-consuming expert human interpretation that is prone to human bias. Supervised deep learning approaches have proven powerful for classification tasks, but they are inherently limited by the cost and quality of annotations used for training these models. To address this limitation of supervised methods, we developed Histomorphological Phenotype Learning (HPL), a fully blue{self-}supervised methodology that requires no expert labels or annotations and operates via the automatic discovery of discriminatory image features in small image tiles. Tiles are grouped into morphologically similar clusters which constitute a library of histomorphological phenotypes, revealing trajectories from benign to malignant tissue via inflammatory and reactive phenotypes. These clusters have distinct features which can be identified using orthogonal methods, linking histologic, molecular and clinical phenotypes. Applied to lung cancer tissues, we show that they align closely with patient survival, with histopathologically recognised tumor types and growth patterns, and with transcriptomic measures of immunophenotype. We then demonstrate that these properties are maintained in a multi-cancer study. These results show the clusters represent recurrent host responses and modes of tumor growth emerging under natural selection. Code, pre-trained models, learned embeddings, and documentation are available to the community at https://github.com/AdalbertoCq/Histomorphological-Phenotype-Learning

Farzaneh Seyedshahi, Francesca Damiola, Sylvie Lantuejoul et al.

Accurate subtype classification and outcome prediction in mesothelioma are essential for guiding therapy and patient care. Most computational pathology models are trained on large tissue images from resection specimens, limiting their use in real-world settings where small biopsies are common. We show that a self-supervised encoder trained on resection tissue can be applied to biopsy material, capturing meaningful morphological patterns. Using these patterns, the model can predict patient survival and classify tumor subtypes. This approach demonstrates the potential of AI-driven tools to support diagnosis and treatment planning in mesothelioma.

Shan E Ahmed Raza, Khalid AbdulJabbar, Mariam Jamal-Hanjani et al.

Automatic cell detection in histology images is a challenging task due to varying size, shape and features of cells and stain variations across a large cohort. Conventional deep learning methods regress the probability of each pixel belonging to the centre of a cell followed by detection of local maxima. We present deconvolution as an alternate approach to local maxima detection. The ground truth points are convolved with a mapping filter to generate artifical labels. A convolutional neural network (CNN) is modified to convolve it's output with the same mapping filter and is trained for the mapped labels. Output of the trained CNN is then deconvolved to generate points as cell detection. We compare our method with state-of-the-art deep learning approaches where the results show that the proposed approach detects cells with comparatively high precision and F1-score.