Computer-aided prognosis: predicting patient and disease outcome via quantitative fusion of multi-scale, multi-modal data.

Computer-aided prognosis (CAP) is a new and exciting complement to the field of computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) and involves developing and applying computerized image analysis and multi-modal data fusion algorithms to digitized patient data (e.g. imaging, tissue, genomic) for helping physicians predict disease outcome and patient survival. While a number of data channels, ranging from the macro (e.g. MRI) to the nano-scales (proteins, genes) are now being routinely acquired for disease characterization, one of the challenges in predicting patient outcome and treatment response has been in our inability to quantitatively fuse these disparate, heterogeneous data sources. At the Laboratory for Computational Imaging and Bioinformatics (LCIB)(1) at Rutgers University, our team has been developing computerized algorithms for high dimensional data and image analysis for predicting disease outcome from multiple modalities including MRI, digital pathology, and protein expression. Additionally, we have been developing novel data fusion algorithms based on non-linear dimensionality reduction methods (such as Graph Embedding) to quantitatively integrate information from multiple data sources and modalities with the overarching goal of optimizing meta-classifiers for making prognostic predictions. In this paper, we briefly describe 4 representative and ongoing CAP projects at LCIB. These projects include (1) an Image-based Risk Score (IbRiS) algorithm for predicting outcome of Estrogen receptor positive breast cancer patients based on quantitative image analysis of digitized breast cancer biopsy specimens alone, (2) segmenting and determining extent of lymphocytic infiltration (identified as a possible prognostic marker for outcome in human epidermal growth factor amplified breast cancers) from digitized histopathology, (3) distinguishing patients with different Gleason grades of prostate cancer (grade being known to be correlated to outcome) from digitized needle biopsy specimens, and (4) integrating protein expression measurements obtained from mass spectrometry with quantitative image features derived from digitized histopathology for distinguishing between prostate cancer patients at low and high risk of disease recurrence following radical prostatectomy.