Whole Slide Multiple Instance Learning for Predicting Axillary Lymph Node Metastasis
This work addresses prognosis and treatment guidance for breast cancer patients, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing methods with minor modifications.
The paper tackled predicting axillary lymph node metastasis in breast cancer using deep learning on biopsy images, achieving results evaluated on a dataset of 1058 patients with ablation studies on data augmentation and manual segmentation.
Breast cancer is a major concern for women's health globally, with axillary lymph node (ALN) metastasis identification being critical for prognosis evaluation and treatment guidance. This paper presents a deep learning (DL) classification pipeline for quantifying clinical information from digital core-needle biopsy (CNB) images, with one step less than existing methods. A publicly available dataset of 1058 patients was used to evaluate the performance of different baseline state-of-the-art (SOTA) DL models in classifying ALN metastatic status based on CNB images. An extensive ablation study of various data augmentation techniques was also conducted. Finally, the manual tumor segmentation and annotation step performed by the pathologists was assessed.