A self-supervised vision transformer to predict survival from histopathology in renal cell carcinoma
Frederik Wessels1,2, Max Schmitt1, Eva Krieghoff-Henning1
1Digital Biomarkers for Oncology Group, National Centre for Tumour Diseases (NCT), German Cancer Research Centre (DKFZ), Im Neuenheimer Feld 280, 69120, Heidelberg, Germany.
Purpose:
To develop and validate an interpretable deep learning model to predict overall and disease-specific survival (OS/DSS) in clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC).
Methods:
Digitised haematoxylin and eosin-stained slides from The Cancer Genome Atlas were used as a training set for a vision transformer (ViT) to extract image features with a self-supervised model called DINO (self-distillation with no labels). Extracted features were used in Cox regression models to prognosticate OS and DSS. Kaplan-Meier for univariable evaluation and Cox regression analyses for multivariable evaluation of the DINO-ViT risk groups were performed for prediction of OS and DSS. For validation, a cohort from a tertiary care centre was used.
Results:
A significant risk stratification was achieved in univariable analysis for OS and DSS in the training (n = 443, log rank test, p < 0.01) and validation set (n = 266, p < 0.01). In multivariable analysis, including age, metastatic status, tumour size and grading, the DINO-ViT risk stratification was a significant predictor for OS (hazard ratio [HR] 3.03; 95%-confidence interval [95%-CI] 2.11-4.35; p < 0.01) and DSS (HR 4.90; 95%-CI 2.78-8.64; p < 0.01) in the training set but only for DSS in the validation set (HR 2.31; 95%-CI 1.15-4.65; p = 0.02). DINO-ViT visualisation showed that features were mainly extracted from nuclei, cytoplasm, and peritumoural stroma, demonstrating good interpretability.
Conclusion:
The DINO-ViT can identify high-risk patients using histological images of ccRCC. This model might improve individual risk-adapted renal cancer therapy in the future.
