Theranostics 2023; 13(4):1342-1354. doi:10.7150/thno.81784 This issue Cite
Research Paper
1. State Key Laboratory of Surface Physics and Department of Physics, Human Phenome Institute, Academy for Engineering and Technology, Key Laboratory of Micro and Nano Photonic Structures (Ministry of Education), Yiwu Research Institute, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China
2. Department of Breast Surgery, Fudan University Shanghai Cancer Center, Department of Oncology, Shanghai Medical College, Fudan University, Shanghai 200032, China
3. Department of Pathology, Fudan University Shanghai Cancer Center, Shanghai 200032, China
4. Endoscopy Center and Endoscopy Research Institute, Zhongshan Hospital, Fudan University, Shanghai, 200032 China
5. Otolaryngology & Head and Neck Center, Cancer Center, Department of Otolaryngology, Zhejiang Provincial People's Hospital, Affiliated People's Hospital, Hangzhou Medical College, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China
6. Cancer Center, Department of Pathology, Zhejiang Provincial People's Hospital, Affiliated People's Hospital, Hangzhou Medical College, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China
# These authors contribute equally.
Core-needle biopsy (CNB) plays a vital role in the initial diagnosis of breast cancer. However, the complex tissue processing and global shortage of pathologists have hindered traditional histopathology from timely diagnosis on fresh biopsies. In this work, we developed a full digital platform by integrating label-free stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) microscopy with weakly-supervised learning for rapid and automated cancer diagnosis on un-labelled breast CNB.
Methods: We first compared the results of SRS imaging with standard hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) staining on adjacent frozen tissue sections. Then fresh unprocessed biopsy tissues were imaged by SRS to reveal diagnostic histoarchitectures. Next, weakly-supervised learning, i.e., the multi-instance learning (MIL) model was conducted to evaluate the ability to differentiate between benign and malignant cases, and compared with the performance of supervised learning model. Finally, gradient-weighted class activation mapping (Grad-CAM) and semantic segmentation were performed to spatially resolve benign/malignant areas with high efficiency.
Results: We verified the ability of SRS in revealing essential histological hallmarks of breast cancer in both thin frozen sections and fresh unprocessed biopsy, generating histoarchitectures well correlated with H&E staining. Moreover, we demonstrated that weakly-supervised MIL model could achieve superior classification performance to supervised learnings, reaching diagnostic accuracy of 95% on 61 biopsy specimens. Furthermore, Grad-CAM allowed the trained MIL model to visualize the histological heterogeneity within the CNB.
Conclusion: Our results indicate that MIL-assisted SRS microscopy provides rapid and accurate diagnosis on histologically heterogeneous breast CNB, and could potentially help the subsequent management of patients.
Keywords: breast cancer, core needle biopsy, label-free histology, stimulated Raman scattering, deep-learning