Assessment of tissue composition with digital pathology in colorectal cancer
Year: 2019
Session type: Poster / e-Poster / Silent Theatre session
Theme: Early detection, diagnosis and prognosis
Abstract
Background
The tumour microenvironment is a key feature to understand cancer biology. Quantification of tissue composition is usually based on visual pathological review (VPR) or deconvolution of whole genome molecular data. The former is a direct measurement with modest reproducibility while the latter is an indirect measurement of unclear accuracy and is expensive. Here we test digital pathology coupled with machine learning as a new tool to assess tissue composition.
Method
As part of the Stratification in COloRecTal cancer (S:CORT) programme, over 500 colorectal cancer (CRC) paraffin blocks from resections and biopsies were sequentially sectioned for RNA/DNA extractions and two Haematoxylin and Eosin stained (H&E) sections. RNA expression microarrays, targeted DNA sequencing and DNA methylation arrays were applied. Tissue composition was obtained by a deep neural net (DNN) algorithm after supervised training on >1,500 tissue areas. Tumour purity estimates (TPE) were obtained from VPR and RNA/methylation arrays. Copy number alterations were adjusted using different TPE and compared. Similar analyses were performed with TCGA CRCs.
Results
DNN estimates including area and cell counts were obtained for tumour, desmoplastic stroma, inflamed stroma, mucin/hypocellular stroma, muscle, necrosis and white space. DNN estimates on the same H&Es obtained matching results (r=1.0). Comparison of paired H&Es showed very high correlations (r~0.85). TPE by VPR consistently underestimated purity which resulted in ~10% overestimation of copy number calls. Conversely, TPE from either RNA or methylation deconvolution showed consistent overestimation resulting in ~10% of copy number undercalls.
Conclusion
Tissue composition analysis with DNN allows analytical robustness, automatization and standardization and provides very high reproducibility at single cell resolution. DNN-based TPE are more accurate than VPR or deconvolution from genome-wide omic platforms which tend to under and overestimate tumour purity respectively. DNN could be used to better plan and assess downstream molecular analyses and investigate tissue-based metrics as potential biomarkers in clinical trials.