Interpretable Deep Neural Network to Predict Estrogen Receptor Status from Haematoxylin-Eosin Images

Philipp Seegerer, Alexander Binder, René Saitenmacher, Michael Bockmayr, Maximilian Alber, Philipp Jurmeister, Frederick Klauschen, Klaus Robert Müller

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapter

    11 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    The eligibility for hormone therapy to treat breast cancer largely depends on the tumor’s estrogen receptor (ER) status. Recent studies show that the ER status correlates with morphological features found in Haematoxylin-Eosin (HE) slides. Thus, HE analysis might be sufficient for patients for whom the classifier confidently predicts the ER status and thereby obviate the need for additional examination, such as immunohistochemical (IHC) staining. Several prior works are limited by either the use of engineered features, multi-stage models that use features unspecific to HE images or a lack of explainability. To address these limitations, this work proposes an end-to-end neural network ensemble that shows state-of-the-art performance. We demonstrate that the approach also translates to the prediction of the cancer grade. Moreover, subsets can be selected from the test data for which the model can detect a positive ER status with a precision of 94% while classifying 13% of the patients. To compensate for the reduced interpretability of the model that comes along with end-to-end training, this work applies Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) to determine the relevant parts of the images a posteriori, commonly visualized as a heatmap overlayed with the input image. We found that nuclear and stromal morphology and lymphocyte infiltration play an important role in the classification of the ER status. This demonstrates that interpretable machine learning can be a vital tool for validating and generating hypotheses about morphological biomarkers.

    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
    PublisherSpringer
    Pages16-37
    Number of pages22
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2020

    Publication series

    NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
    Volume12090 LNCS
    ISSN (Print)0302-9743
    ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

    Bibliographical note

    Publisher Copyright:
    © 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

    Keywords

    • Deep learning
    • Digital pathology
    • Explainable AI

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • Theoretical Computer Science
    • General Computer Science

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