1. Integrated tumor identification and automated scoring minimizes pathologist involvement and provides new insights to key biomarkers in breast cancer
- Author
-
Gareth Irwin, Darragh G. McArt, Maurice B Loughrey, Gerald Li, David P Boyle, Stephen McQuaid, Peter W. Hamilton, D. Paul Harkin, Peter Bankhead, Jacqueline James, Manuel Salto-Tellez, and José A Fernández
- Subjects
0301 basic medicine ,Pathology ,medicine.medical_specialty ,Receptor, ErbB-2 ,Concordance ,Breast Neoplasms ,Northern Ireland ,Sensitivity and Specificity ,Pathology and Forensic Medicine ,Cohort Studies ,03 medical and health sciences ,0302 clinical medicine ,Breast cancer ,SDG 3 - Good Health and Well-being ,Journal Article ,Biomarkers, Tumor ,Image Processing, Computer-Assisted ,Humans ,Medicine ,Cutoff ,Breast ,Biomarker Analysis ,Precision Medicine ,Molecular Biology ,Survival analysis ,Tissue microarray ,business.industry ,Reproducibility of Results ,Cell Biology ,medicine.disease ,Precision medicine ,Immunohistochemistry ,Survival Analysis ,030104 developmental biology ,Receptors, Estrogen ,Tissue Array Analysis ,030220 oncology & carcinogenesis ,Biomarker (medicine) ,Female ,Neoplasm Grading ,Receptors, Progesterone ,business ,Software ,Follow-Up Studies - Abstract
Digital image analysis (DIA) is becoming central to the quantitative evaluation of tissue biomarkers for discovery, diagnosis and therapeutic selection for the delivery of precision medicine. In this study, automated DIA using a new purpose-built software platform (QuPath) is applied to a cohort of 293 breast cancer patients to score five biomarkers in tissue microarrays (TMAs): ER, PR, HER2, Ki67 and p53. This software is able to measure IHC expression following fully automated tumor recognition in the same immunohistochemical (IHC)-stained tissue section, as part of a rapid workflow to ensure objectivity and accelerate biomarker analysis. The digital scores produced by QuPath were compared with manual scores by a pathologist and shown to have a good level of concordance in all cases (Cohen's κ>0.6), and almost perfect agreement for the clinically relevant biomarkers ER, PR and HER2 (κ>0.86). To assess prognostic value, cutoff thresholds could be applied to both manual and automated scores using the QuPath software, and survival analysis performed for 5-year overall survival. DIA was shown to be capable of replicating the statistically significant stratification of patients achieved using manual scoring across all biomarkers (P
- Published
- 2018