Computational pathology analysis of tissue microarrays predicts survival of renal clear cell carcinoma patients

Med Image Comput Comput Assist Interv. 2008;11(Pt 2):1-8. doi: 10.1007/978-3-540-85990-1_1.

Abstract

Renal cell carcinoma (RCC) can be diagnosed by histological tissue analysis where exact counts of cancerous cell nuclei are required. We propose a completely automated image analysis pipeline to predict the survival of RCC patients based on the analysis of immunohistochemical staining of MIB-1 on tissue microarrays. A random forest classifier detects cell nuclei of cancerous cells and predicts their staining. The classifier training is achieved by expert annotations of 2300 nuclei gathered from tissues of 9 different RCC patients. The application to a test set of 133 patients clearly demonstrates that our computational pathology analysis matches the prognostic performance of expert pathologists.

MeSH terms

  • Carcinoma, Renal Cell / metabolism*
  • Carcinoma, Renal Cell / pathology*
  • Humans
  • Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / methods*
  • Kidney Neoplasms / mortality*
  • Kidney Neoplasms / pathology*
  • Pattern Recognition, Automated / methods*
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Sensitivity and Specificity
  • Survival Analysis*
  • Survival Rate
  • Tumor Cells, Cultured