HEROHE Challenge: assessing HER2 status in breast cancer without immunohistochemistry or in situ hybridization
This addresses the problem of reducing diagnostic complexity and bias in breast cancer classification for patients and clinicians, but it is incremental as it builds on existing digital pathology methods.
The HEROHE Challenge aimed to automate HER2 status assessment in breast cancer using only hematoxylin and eosin stained tissue samples, reducing steps and human bias, with results from 21 teams showing potential to advance the state-of-the-art.
Breast cancer is the most common malignancy in women, being responsible for more than half a million deaths every year. As such, early and accurate diagnosis is of paramount importance. Human expertise is required to diagnose and correctly classify breast cancer and define appropriate therapy, which depends on the evaluation of the expression of different biomarkers such as the transmembrane protein receptor HER2. This evaluation requires several steps, including special techniques such as immunohistochemistry or in situ hybridization to assess HER2 status. With the goal of reducing the number of steps and human bias in diagnosis, the HEROHE Challenge was organized, as a parallel event of the 16th European Congress on Digital Pathology, aiming to automate the assessment of the HER2 status based only on hematoxylin and eosin stained tissue sample of invasive breast cancer. Methods to assess HER2 status were presented by 21 teams worldwide and the results achieved by some of the proposed methods open potential perspectives to advance the state-of-the-art.