Label-free tumor cells classification using deep learning and high-content imaging

Many studies have shown that cellular morphology can be used to distinguish spiked-in tumor cells in blood sample background. However, most validation experiments included only homogeneous cell lines and inadequately captured the broad morphological heterogeneity of cancer cells. Furthermore, normal, non-blood cells could be erroneously classified as cancer because their morphology differ from blood cells. Here, we constructed a dataset of microscopic images of organoid-derived cancer and normal cell with diverse morphology and developed a proof-of-concept deep learning model that can distinguish cancer cells from normal cells within an unlabeled microscopy image. In total, more than 75,000 organoid-drived cells from 3 cholangiocarcinoma patients were collected. The model achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristics curve (AUROC) of 0.78 and can generalize to cell images from an unseen patient. These resources serve as a foundation for an automated, robust platform for circulating tumor cell detection.