Integrative Analysis of Histopathological Images and Genomic Data in Colon Adenocarcinoma

Colon adenocarcinoma (COAD) is one of the most common malignant tumors in the world. The histopathological features are crucial for the diagnosis, prognosis, and therapy of COAD.

We downloaded 719 whole-slide histopathological images from TCIA, and 459 corresponding HTSeq-counts mRNA expression and clinical data were obtained from TCGA. Histopathological image features were extracted by CellProfiler. Prognostic image features were selected by the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) and support vector machine (SVM) algorithms. The co-expression gene module correlated with prognostic image features was identified by weighted gene co-expression network analysis (WGCNA). Random forest was employed to construct an integrative prognostic model and calculate the histopathological-genomic prognosis factor (HGPF).

There were five prognostic image features and one co-expression gene module involved in the model construction. The time-dependent receiver operating curve showed that the prognostic model had a significant prognostic value. Patients were divided into high-risk group and low-risk group based on the HGPF. Kaplan-Meier analysis indicated that the overall survival of the low-risk group was significantly better than the high-risk group.

These results suggested that the histopathological image features had a certain ability to predict the survival of COAD patients. The integrative prognostic model based on the histopathological images and genomic features could further improve the prognosis prediction in COAD, which may assist the clinical decision in the future.