Single Shot AI-assisted quantification of KI-67 proliferation index in breast cancer
This provides an efficient and objective alternative to conventional scoring methods for pathologists, though it is incremental as it applies an existing AI framework to a specific medical imaging task.
This study tackled the problem of unreliable quantification of Ki-67 proliferation index in breast cancer by introducing an AI-assisted method using YOLOv8, achieving a mean Average Precision exceeding 85% for detecting Ki-67-positive cells.
Reliable quantification of Ki-67, a key proliferation marker in breast cancer, is essential for molecular subtyping and informed treatment planning. Conventional approaches, including visual estimation and manual counting, suffer from interobserver variability and limited reproducibility. This study introduces an AI-assisted method using the YOLOv8 object detection framework for automated Ki-67 scoring. High-resolution digital images (40x magnification) of immunohistochemically stained tumor sections were captured from Ki-67 hotspot regions and manually annotated by a domain expert to distinguish Ki-67-positive and negative tumor cells. The dataset was augmented and divided into training (80%), validation (10%), and testing (10%) subsets. Among the YOLOv8 variants tested, the Medium model achieved the highest performance, with a mean Average Precision at 50% Intersection over Union (mAP50) exceeding 85% for Ki-67-positive cells. The proposed approach offers an efficient, scalable, and objective alternative to conventional scoring methods, supporting greater consistency in Ki-67 evaluation. Future directions include developing user-friendly clinical interfaces and expanding to multi-institutional datasets to enhance generalizability and facilitate broader adoption in diagnostic practice.