Deep Learning Models Capture Histological Disease Activity in Crohn's Disease and Ulcerative Colitis with High Fidelity.

Background and Aims: Histological disease activity in inflammatory bowel disease [IBD] is associated with clinical outcomes and is an important endpoint in drug development. We developed deep learning models for automating histological assessments in IBD.
Methods: Histology images of intestinal mucosa from phase 2 and phase 3 clinical trials in Crohn's disease [CD] and ulcerative colitis [UC] were used to train artificial intelligence [AI] models to predict the Global Histology Activity Score [GHAS] for CD and Geboes histopathology score for UC. Three AI methods were compared. AI models were evaluated on held-back testing sets, and model predictions were compared against an expert central reader and five independent pathologists.
Results: The model based on multiple instance learning and the attention mechanism [SA-AbMILP] demonstrated the best performance among competing models. AI-modelled GHAS and Geboes subgrades matched central readings with moderate to substantial agreement, with accuracies ranging from 65% to 89%. Furthermore, the model was able to distinguish the presence and absence of pathology across four selected histological features, with accuracies for colon in both CD and UC ranging from 87% to 94% and for CD ileum ranging from 76% to 83%. For both CD and UC and across anatomical compartments [ileum and colon] in CD, comparable accuracies against central readings were found between the model-assigned scores and scores by an independent set of pathologists.
Conclusions: Deep learning models based upon GHAS and Geboes scoring systems were effective at distinguishing between the presence and absence of IBD microscopic disease activity.
(© The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of European Crohn’s and Colitis Organisation.)