Domain adaptation and self-supervised learning for surgical margin detection

One in five women who undergo breast conserving surgery will need a second revision surgery due to remaining tumor. The iKnife is a mass spectrometry modality that produces real-time margin information based on the metabolite signatures in surgical smoke. Using this modality and real-time tissue classification, surgeons could remove all cancerous tissue during the initial surgery, improving many facets of patient outcomes. An obstacle in developing a iKnife breast cancer recognition model is the destructive, time-consuming and sensitive nature of the data collection that limits the size of the datasets.

We address these challenges by first, building a self-supervised learning model from limited, weakly labeled data. By doing so, the model can learn to contextualize the general features of iKnife data from a more accessible cancer type. Second, the trained model can then be applied to a cancer classification task on breast data. This domain adaptation allows for the transfer of learnt weights from models of one tissue type to another.

Our datasets contained 320 skin burns (129 tumor burns, 191 normal burns) from 51 patients and 144 breast tissue burns (41 tumor and 103 normal) from 11 patients. We investigate the effect of different hyper-parameters on the performance of the final classifier. The proposed two-step method performed statistically significantly better than a baseline model (p-value < 0.0001), by achieving an accuracy, sensitivity and specificity of 92%, 88% and 92%, respectively.

This is the first application of domain transfer for iKnife REIMS data. We showed that having a limited number of breast data samples for training a classifier can be compensated by self-supervised learning and domain adaption on a set of unlabeled skin data. We plan to confirm this performance by collecting new breast samples and extending it to incorporate other cancer tissues.