Classification and prediction of chemoradiotherapy response and survival from esophageal carcinoma histopathology...

Whole slide imaging (WSI) of Hematoxylin and Eosin-stained biopsy specimens has been used to predict chemoradiotherapy (CRT) response and overall survival (OS) of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) patients. This retrospective study collected 279 specimens in 89 non-surgical ESCC patients through endoscopic biopsy between January 2010 and January 2019. These patients were divided into a CRT response group (CR + PR group) and a CRT non-response group (SD + PD group). The WSIs have segmented approximately 1,206,000 non-overlapping patches. Two experienced pathologists manually delineated the eight types of tissues on 32 WSIs, including esophagus tumor cell (TUM), cancer-associated stroma (CAS), normal epithelium layer (NEL), smooth muscle (MUS), lymphocytes (LYM), Red cells (RED), debris (DEB), uneven areas (UNE). The chemoradiotherapy response prediction models were built using maximum relevance-minimum redundancy (MRMR) feature selection and least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) regression. However, pathological features with p < 0.1 were selected and integrated to be further screened using a LASSO Cox regression model to build a multivariate Cox proportional hazards model for predicting the OS. The testing accuracy of the tissue classification model was 91.3 %. The pathological model created using two CAS in-depth features and eight TUM in-depth features performed best for the prediction of treatment response and achieved an AUC of 0.744. For the prediction of OS, the testing AUC of this model at one year and three years were 0.675 and 0.870, respectively. The TUM model showed the highest AUC at one year (0.712). With its high accuracy rate, the deep learning model has the potential to transform from bench to bedside in clinical practice, improve patient's quality of life, and prolong the OS rate.