Continuous representation of tumor microvessel density and detection of angiogenic hotspots in histological whole-slide images

By Jakob Nikolas Kather, A. Marx, C. Reyes-Aldasoro, Lothar Rudi Schad, Frank G. Zöllner, Cleo-Aron Weis. 2015

66 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Blood vessels in solid tumors are not randomly distributed, but are clustered in angiogenic hotspots. Tumor microvessel density (MVD) within these hotspots correlates with patient survival and is widely used both in diagnostic routine and in clinical trials. Still, these hotspots are usually subjectively defined. There is no unbiased, continuous and explicit representation of tumor vessel distribution in histological whole slide images. This shortcoming distorts angiogenesis measurements and may account for ambiguous results in the literature. In the present study, we describe and evaluate a new method that eliminates this bias and makes angiogenesis quantification more objective and more efficient. Our approach involves automatic slide scanning, automatic image analysis and spatial statistical analysis. By comparing a continuous MVD function of the actual sample to random point patterns, we introduce an objective criterion for hotspot detection: An angiogenic hotspot is defined as a clustering of blood vessels that is very unlikely to occur randomly. We evaluate the proposed method in N=11 images of human colorectal carcinoma samples and compare the results to a blinded human observer. For the first time, we demonstrate the existence of statistically significant hotspots in tumor images and provide a tool to accurately detect these hotspots.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Molecular Biology, Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging

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Citations in the corpus

Predicting survival from colorectal cancer histology slides using deep learning: A retrospective multicenter study (2019, background): “Previouswork on digital pathologyhasusedcomputer-basedimageanalysisapproachesfor celldetectionandclassification [6], tissueclassification[7], nucleiandmitosisdetection[8,9],microvessel segmentation [10], andother immunohistochemistry scoringtasks[11] in histopathological images.”
Oral squamous cell carcinomas: state of the field and emerging directions (2023, methodology): “419 In addition to immunohistochemical staining techniques for identifying vessels, angiogenesis can be investigated by other methods, such as the Chalkley method and ﬂ ow cytometry.”