Jan. 30, 2023: Lambda Moses, California Institute of Technology

“From geospatial to spatial -omics with SpatialFeatureExperiment and Voyager”; https://partners.zoom.us/j/82826415806; To bring more of the geospatial tradition to spatial -omics, we developed SpatialFeatureExperiment (SFE), which extends the existing Bioconductor data structures SingleCellExperiment (SCE) and SpatialExperiment (SPE) with Simple Features to represent the geometries of Visium spots and cell segmentation and perform geometric operations. We developed the Voyager package that performs exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) on SFE objects.

Nov. 14, 2022: Martin Jankowiak, PhD, Broad Institute

“Inferring selection effects in SARS-CoV-2 with Bayesian Viral Allele Selection,” https://partners.zoom.us/j/86162386947; We develop Bayesian Viral Allele Selection (BVAS), a method that leverages the millions of SARS-CoV-2 viral genomes that have been sequenced across the globe to identify mutations linked to increased viral fitness.

Mahmood Lab’s Pan-cancer integrative histology-genomic analysis is featured on cover of Cancer Cell

Mahmood Lab’s Pan-cancer integrative histology-genomic analysis is featured on cover of Cancer Cell

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.

Chen RJ, Lu MY, Williamson DFK, Chen TY, Lipkova J, Noor Z, Shaban M, Shady M, Williams M, Joo B, Mahmood F. Pan-cancer integrative histology-genomic analysis via multimodal deep learning. Cancer Cell. 2022 Aug 8;40(8):865-878.e6. doi: 10.1016/j.ccell.2022.07.004. PMID: 35944502.

Mahmood Lab’s deep learning-enabled assessment of cardiac transplant rejection study is published in Nature Medicine

Mahmood Lab’s deep learning-enabled assessment of cardiac transplant rejection study is published in Nature Medicine

Endomyocardial biopsy (EMB) screening represents the standard of care for detecting allograft rejections after heart transplant. Manual interpretation of EMBs is affected by substantial interobserver and intraobserver variability, which often leads to inappropriate treatment with immunosuppressive drugs, unnecessary follow-up biopsies and poor transplant outcomes. Here we present a deep learning-based artificial intelligence (AI) system for automated assessment of gigapixel whole-slide images obtained from EMBs, which simultaneously addresses detection, subtyping and grading of allograft rejection. To assess model performance, we curated a large dataset from the United States, as well as independent test cohorts from Turkey and Switzerland, which includes large-scale variability across populations, sample preparations and slide scanning instrumentation. The model detects allograft rejection with an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.962; assesses the cellular and antibody-mediated rejection type with AUCs of 0.958 and 0.874, respectively; detects Quilty B lesions, benign mimics of rejection, with an AUC of 0.939; and differentiates between low-grade and high-grade rejections with an AUC of 0.833. In a human reader study, the AI system showed non-inferior performance to conventional assessment and reduced interobserver variability and assessment time. This robust evaluation of cardiac allograft rejection paves the way for clinical trials to establish the efficacy of AI-assisted EMB assessment and its potential for improving heart transplant outcomes.

Lipkova, J., Chen, T.Y., Lu, M.Y. et al. Deep learning-enabled assessment of cardiac allograft rejection from endomyocardial biopsies. Nat Med 28, 575–582 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-022-01709-2

Mahmood Lab’s study on AI-based cancer origin prediction using conventional histology is published in Nature

Mahmood Lab’s study on AI-based cancer origin prediction using conventional histology is published in Nature

Cancer of unknown primary (CUP) origin is an enigmatic group of diagnoses in which the primary anatomical site of tumour origin cannot be determined1,2. This poses a considerable challenge, as modern therapeutics are predominantly specific to the primary tumour3. Recent research has focused on using genomics and transcriptomics to identify the origin of a tumour4–9. However, genomic testing is not always performed and lacks clinical penetration in low-resource settings. Here, to overcome these challenges, we present a deep-learning-based algorithm—Tumour Origin Assessment via Deep Learning (TOAD)—that can provide a differential diagnosis for the origin of the primary tumour using routinely acquired histology slides. We used whole-slide images of tumours with known primary origins to train a model that simultaneously identifies the tumour as primary or metastatic and predicts its site of origin. On our held-out test set of tumours with known primary origins, the model achieved a top-1 accuracy of 0.83 and a top-3 accuracy of 0.96, whereas on our external test set it achieved top-1 and top-3 accuracies of 0.80 and 0.93, respectively. We further curated a dataset of 317 cases of CUP for which a differential diagnosis was assigned. Our model predictions resulted in concordance for 61% of cases and a top-3 agreement of 82%. TOAD can be used as an assistive tool to assign a differential diagnosis to complicated cases of metastatic tumours and CUPs and could be used in conjunction with or in lieu of ancillary tests and extensive diagnostic work-ups to reduce the occurrence of CUP.

Lu, M.Y., Chen, T.Y., Williamson, D.F.K. et al. AI-based pathology predicts origins for cancers of unknown primary. Nature 594, 106–110 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03512-4

Mahmood Lab’s CLAM method, A Deep-Learning-based Pipeline for Data Efficient and Weakly Supervised Whole-Slide-level Analysis, published in Nature Biomedical Engineering

Mahmood Lab’s CLAM method, A Deep-Learning-based Pipeline for Data Efficient and Weakly Supervised Whole-Slide-level Analysis, published in Nature Biomedical Engineering

Deep-learning methods for computational pathology require either manual annotation of gigapixel whole-slide images (WSIs) or large datasets of WSIs with slide-level labels and typically suffer from poor domain adaptation and interpretability. Here we report an interpretable weakly supervised deep-learning method for data-efficient WSI processing and learning that only requires slide-level labels. The method, which we named clustering-constrained-attention multiple-instance learning (CLAM), uses attention-based learning to identify subregions of high diagnostic value to accurately classify whole slides and instance-level clustering over the identified representative regions to constrain and refine the feature space. By applying CLAM to the subtyping of renal cell carcinoma and non-small-cell lung cancer as well as the detection of lymph node metastasis, we show that it can be used to localize well-known morphological features on WSIs without the need for spatial labels, that it overperforms standard weakly supervised classification algorithms and that it is adaptable to independent test cohorts, smartphone microscopy and varying tissue content.

Lu, M.Y., Williamson, D.F.K., Chen, T.Y. et al. Data-efficient and weakly supervised computational pathology on whole-slide images. Nat Biomed Eng 5, 555–570 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41551-020-00682-w