Paper ID: 2311.09574

LymphoML: An interpretable artificial intelligence-based method identifies morphologic features that correlate with lymphoma subtype

Vivek Shankar, Xiaoli Yang, Vrishab Krishna, Brent Tan, Oscar Silva, Rebecca Rojansky, Andrew Ng, Fabiola Valvert, Edward Briercheck, David Weinstock, Yasodha Natkunam, Sebastian Fernandez-Pol, Pranav Rajpurkar

The accurate classification of lymphoma subtypes using hematoxylin and eosin (H&E)-stained tissue is complicated by the wide range of morphological features these cancers can exhibit. We present LymphoML - an interpretable machine learning method that identifies morphologic features that correlate with lymphoma subtypes. Our method applies steps to process H&E-stained tissue microarray cores, segment nuclei and cells, compute features encompassing morphology, texture, and architecture, and train gradient-boosted models to make diagnostic predictions. LymphoML's interpretable models, developed on a limited volume of H&E-stained tissue, achieve non-inferior diagnostic accuracy to pathologists using whole-slide images and outperform black box deep-learning on a dataset of 670 cases from Guatemala spanning 8 lymphoma subtypes. Using SHapley Additive exPlanation (SHAP) analysis, we assess the impact of each feature on model prediction and find that nuclear shape features are most discriminative for DLBCL (F1-score: 78.7%) and classical Hodgkin lymphoma (F1-score: 74.5%). Finally, we provide the first demonstration that a model combining features from H&E-stained tissue with features from a standardized panel of 6 immunostains results in a similar diagnostic accuracy (85.3%) to a 46-stain panel (86.1%).

Submitted: Nov 16, 2023