Artificial Intelligence-based Tumor Segmentation in Mouse Models of Lung Adenocarcinoma

Mouse models are highly effective for studying the pathophysiology of lung adenocarcinoma and evaluating new treatment strategies. Treatment efficacy is primarily determined by the total tumor burden measured on excised tumor specimens. The measurement process is time-consuming and prone to human errors. To address this issue, we developed a novel deep learning model to segment lung tumor foci on digitally scanned hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) histology slides.

Digital slides of 239 mice from 9 experimental cohorts were split into training (n=137), validation (n=37), and testing cohorts (n=65). Image patches of 500×500 pixels were extracted from 5× and 10× magnifications, along with binary masks of expert annotations representing ground-truth tumor regions. Deep learning models utilizing DeepLabV3+ and UNet architectures were trained for binary segmentation of tumor foci under varying stain normalization conditions. The performance of algorithm segmentation was assessed by Dice Coefficient, and detection was evaluated by sensitivity and positive-predictive value (PPV).

The best model on patch-based validation was DeepLabV3+ using a Resnet-50 backbone, which achieved Dice 0.890 and 0.873 on validation and testing cohort, respectively. This result corresponded to 91.3 Sensitivity and 51.0 PPV in the validation cohort and 93.7 Sensitivity and 51.4 PPV in the testing cohort. False positives could be reduced 10-fold with thresholding artificial intelligence (AI) predicted output by area, without negative impact on Dice Coefficient. Evaluation at various stain normalization strategies did not demonstrate improvement from the baseline model.

A robust AI-based algorithm for detecting and segmenting lung tumor foci in the pre-clinical mouse models was developed. The output of this algorithm is compatible with open-source software that researchers commonly use.