EOCSA: Predicting Prognosis of Epithelial Ovarian Cancer with Whole Slide Histopathological Images

TL;DR

This paper introduces EOCSA, a deep learning framework that predicts epithelial ovarian cancer prognosis from whole slide images, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy with a novel patch clustering and attention-based feature extraction approach.

Contribution

The study presents the first deep neural network method for EOC survival prediction from WSIs, combining patch clustering, attention mechanisms, and a LASSO-Cox model for improved accuracy.

Findings

Achieved 0.980 C-index in survival prediction.

First to analyze EOC prognosis using WSIs and deep learning.

Demonstrated the effectiveness of attention mechanisms in feature extraction.

Abstract

Ovarian cancer is one of the most serious cancers that threaten women around the world. Epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC), as the most commonly seen subtype of ovarian cancer, has rather high mortality rate and poor prognosis among various gynecological cancers. Survival analysis outcome is able to provide treatment advices to doctors. In recent years, with the development of medical imaging technology, survival prediction approaches based on pathological images have been proposed. In this study, we designed a deep framework named EOCSA which analyzes the prognosis of EOC patients based on pathological whole slide images (WSIs). Specifically, we first randomly extracted patches from WSIs and grouped them into multiple clusters. Next, we developed a survival prediction model, named DeepConvAttentionSurv (DCAS), which was able to extract patch-level features, removed less discriminative clusters and predicted the EOC survival precisely. Particularly, channel attention, spatial attention, and neuron attention mechanisms were used to improve the performance of feature extraction. Then patient-level features were generated from our weight calculation method and the survival time was finally estimated using LASSO-Cox model. The proposed EOCSA is efficient and effective in predicting prognosis of EOC and the DCAS ensures more informative and discriminative features can be extracted. As far as we know, our work is the first to analyze the survival of EOC based on WSIs and deep neural network technologies. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed framework has achieved state-of-the-art performance of 0.980 C-index. The implementation of the approach can be found at https://github.com/RanSuLab/EOCprognosis.