Khan Amjad, Janowczyk Andrew, Müller Felix, Blank Annika, Nguyen Huu Giao, Abbet Christian, Studer Linda, Lugli Alessandro, Dawson Heather, Thiran Jean-Philippe, Zlobec Inti
Institute of Pathology, University of Bern, Murtenstrasse 31, CH-3008 Bern, Switzerland.
Case Western Reserve University, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Cleveland, OH 44106, USA.
J Pathol Inform. 2022 Jul 25;13:100127. doi: 10.1016/j.jpi.2022.100127. eCollection 2022.
Computer-aided diagnostics in histopathology are based on the digitization of glass slides. However, heterogeneity between the images generated by different slide scanners can unfavorably affect the performance of computational algorithms. Here, we evaluate the impact of scanner variability on lymph node segmentation due to its clinical importance in colorectal cancer diagnosis. 100 slides containing 276 lymph nodes were digitized using 4 different slide scanners, and 50 of the lymph nodes containing metastatic cancer cells. These 400 scans were subsequently annotated by 2 experienced pathologists to precisely label lymph node boundary. Three different segmentation methods were then applied and compared: Hematoxylin-channel-based thresholding (HCT), Hematoxylin-based active contours (HAC), and a convolution neural network (U-Net). Evaluation of U-Net trained from both a single scanner and an ensemble of all scanners was completed. Mosaic images based on representative tiles from a scanner were used as a reference image to normalize the new data from different test scanners to evaluate the performance of a pre-trained model. Fine-tuning was carried out by using weights of a model trained on one scanner to initialize model weights for other scanners. To evaluate the domain generalization, domain adversarial learning and stain mix-up augmentation were also implemented. Results show that fine-tuning and domain adversarial learning decreased the impact of scanner variability and greatly improved segmentation across scanners. Overall, U-Net with stain mix-up (Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) = 0.87), domain adversarial learning (MCC = 0.86), and HAC (MCC = 0.87) were shown to outperform HCT (MCC = 0.81) for segmentation of lymph nodes when compared against the ground truth. The findings of this study should be considered for future algorithms applied in diagnostic routines.
组织病理学中的计算机辅助诊断基于玻璃切片的数字化。然而,不同玻片扫描仪生成的图像之间的异质性可能会对计算算法的性能产生不利影响。在此,由于其在结直肠癌诊断中的临床重要性,我们评估了扫描仪变异性对淋巴结分割的影响。使用4种不同的玻片扫描仪对包含276个淋巴结的100张玻片进行数字化处理,其中50个淋巴结含有转移癌细胞。随后,由2名经验丰富的病理学家对这400次扫描进行注释,以精确标记淋巴结边界。然后应用并比较了三种不同的分割方法:基于苏木精通道的阈值分割(HCT)、基于苏木精的活动轮廓(HAC)和卷积神经网络(U-Net)。完成了从单个扫描仪和所有扫描仪的集合中训练U-Net的评估。基于来自扫描仪的代表性切片的拼接图像被用作参考图像,以对来自不同测试扫描仪的新数据进行归一化,从而评估预训练模型的性能。通过使用在一个扫描仪上训练的模型的权重来初始化其他扫描仪的模型权重进行微调。为了评估域泛化,还实施了域对抗学习和染色混合增强。结果表明,微调与域对抗学习降低了扫描仪变异性的影响,并大大提高了跨扫描仪的分割效果。总体而言,与真实情况相比,具有染色混合(马修斯相关系数(MCC)=0.87)、域对抗学习(MCC=0.86)和HAC(MCC=0.87)的U-Net在淋巴结分割方面表现优于HCT(MCC=0.81)。本研究的结果应被应用于未来诊断程序的算法中。
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