A Pragmatic Machine Learning Approach to Quantify Tumor-Infiltrating Lymphocytes in Whole Slide Images

Simple Summary Tumor tissues sampled from patients contain prognostic and predictive information beyond what is currently being used in clinical practice. Large-scale digitization enables new ways of exploiting this information. The most promising analysis pipelines include deep learning/artificial intelligence (AI). However, to ensure success, AI often requires a time-consuming curation of data. In our approach, we repurposed AI pipelines and training data for cell segmentation and classification to identify tissue-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) in lung cancer tissue. We showed that our approach is able to identify TILs and provide prognostic information in an unseen dataset from lung cancer patients. Our methods can be adapted in myriad ways and may help pave the way for the large-scale deployment of digital pathology. Increased levels of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) indicate favorable outcomes in many types of cancer. The manual quantification of immune cells is inaccurate and time-consuming for pathologists. Our aim is to leverage a computational solution to automatically quantify TILs in standard diagnostic hematoxylin and eosin-stained sections (H&E slides) from lung cancer patients. Our approach is to transfer an open-source machine learning method for the segmentation and classification of nuclei in H&E slides trained on public data to TIL quantification without manual labeling of the data. Our results show that the resulting TIL quantification correlates to the patient prognosis and compares favorably to the current state-of-the-art method for immune cell detection in non-small cell lung cancer (current standard CD8 cells in DAB-stained TMAs HR 0.34, 95% CI 0.17-0.68 vs. TILs in HE WSIs: HoVer-Net PanNuke Aug Model HR 0.30, 95% CI 0.15-0.60 and HoVer-Net MoNuSAC Aug model HR 0.27, 95% CI 0.14-0.53). Our approach bridges the gap between machine learning research, translational clinical research and clinical implementation. However, further validation is warranted before implementation in a clinical setting.

Automated summary

Tumor tissues from patients contain valuable prognostic and predictive information. Our approach utilizes AI pipelines and training data to identify tissue-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) in lung cancer tissue and provide prognostic information. This method has the potential to pave the way for large-scale deployment of digital pathology.