Machine learning based local recurrence prediction in colorectal cancer using polarized light imaging

Current treatment for stage III colorectal cancer (CRC) patients involves surgery that may not be sufficient in many cases, requiring additional adjuvant systemic therapy. Identification of this latter cohort that is likely to recur following surgery is key to better personalized therapy selection, but there is a lack of proper quantitative assessment tools for potential clinical adoption.

The purpose of this study is to employ Mueller matrix (MM) polarized light microscopy in combination with supervised machine learning (ML) to quantitatively analyze the prognostic value of peri-tumoral collagen in CRC in relation to 5-year local recurrence (LR).

A simple MM microscope setup was used to image surgical resection samples acquired from stage III CRC patients. Various potential biomarkers of LR were derived from MM elements via decomposition and transformation operations. These were used as features by different supervised ML models to distinguish samples from patients that locally recurred 5 years later from those that did not.

Using the top five most prognostic polarimetric biomarkers ranked by their relevant feature importances, the best-performing XGBoost model achieved a patient-level accuracy of 86%. When the patient pool was further stratified, 96% accuracy was achieved within a tumor-stage-III sub-cohort.

ML-aided polarimetric analysis of collagenous stroma may provide prognostic value toward improving the clinical management of CRC patients.