Richard Chen

Pronouns

He/Him/His

Job Title

Research Trainee

Academic Rank

Department

Pathology

Authors

Richard J Chen, Ming Y Lu*, Drew FK Williamson*, Tiffany Y Chen*, Jana Lipkova, Zahra Noor, Muhammad Shaban, Maha Shady, Mane Williams, Bumjin Joo, Faisal Mahmood

Principal Investigator

Faisal Mahmood

Research Category: Cancer

Tags

Pan-cancer integrative histology-genomic analysis via multimodal deep learning

Scientific Abstract

The rapidly emerging field of computational pathology has demonstrated promise in developing objective prognostic models from histology images. However, most prognostic models are either based on histology or genomics alone and do not address how these data sources can be integrated to develop joint image-omic prognostic models. Additionally, identifying explainable morphological and molecular descriptors from these models that govern such prognosis is of interest. We use multimodal deep learning to jointly examine pathology whole-slide images and molecular profile data from 14 cancer types. Our weakly supervised, multimodal deep-learning algorithm is able to fuse these heterogeneous modalities to predict outcomes and discover prognostic features that correlate with poor and favorable outcomes. We present all analyses for morphological and molecular correlates of patient prognosis across the 14 cancer types at both a disease and a patient level in an interactive open-access database to allow for further exploration, biomarker discovery, and feature assessment.

Lay Abstract

The rapidly emerging field of computational pathology has demonstrated promise in developing objective prognostic models from histology images. However, most prognostic models are either based on histology or genomics alone and do not address how these data sources can be integrated to develop joint image-omic prognostic models. Additionally, identifying explainable morphological and molecular descriptors from these models that govern such prognosis is of interest. We use multimodal deep learning to jointly examine pathology whole-slide images and molecular profile data from 14 cancer types. Our weakly supervised, multimodal deep-learning algorithm is able to fuse these heterogeneous modalities to predict outcomes and discover prognostic features that correlate with poor and favorable outcomes. We present all analyses for morphological and molecular correlates of patient prognosis across the 14 cancer types at both a disease and a patient level in an interactive open-access database to allow for further exploration, biomarker discovery, and feature assessment.

Clinical Implications

The following works have important clinical implications in developing prognostic AI algorithms, in which these methods are able to learn interactions between important morphological features such as tumor cells and lymphocytes, which have known to correlate with response to immunotherapy. Potentially, these techniques may be able to understand why certain patients fail to respond to immunotherapy and have worsened cancer survival.