Deep learning-based virtual cytokeratin staining of gastric carcinomas to measure tumor-stroma ratio

The tumor-stroma ratio (TSR) determined by pathologists is subject to intra- and inter-observer variability. We aimed to develop a computational quantification method of TSR using deep learning-based virtual cytokeratin staining algorithms. Patients with 373 advanced (stage III [n = 171] and IV [n = 202]) gastric cancers were analyzed for TSR. Moderate agreement was observed, with a kappa value of 0.623, between deep learning metrics (dTSR) and visual measurement by pathologists (vTSR) and the area under the curve of receiver operating characteristic of 0.907. Moreover, dTSR was significantly associated with the overall survival of the patients (P = 0.0024). In conclusion, we developed a virtual cytokeratin staining and deep learning-based TSR measurement, which may aid in the diagnosis of TSR in gastric cancer.