A New ML Model Can Classify Lung Cancer Slides At The Pathologist Level


Machine learning has improved dramatically in recent years and shown great promise in the field of medical image analysis. A team of research specialists at Dartmouth’s Norris Cotton Cancer Center have utilized machine learning capabilities to assist with the challenging task of grading tumor patterns and subtypes of lung adenocarcinoma, the most common form of the leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide.

Currently, lung adenocarcinoma, requires pathologist’s visual examination of lobectomy slides to determine the tumor patterns and subtypes. This classification has an important role in prognosis and determination of treatment for lung cancer, however is a difficult and subjective task. Using recent advances in machine learning, the team, led by Saeed Hassanpour, Ph.D., developed a deep neural network to classify different types of lung adenocarcinoma on histopathology slides, and found that the model performed on par with three practicing pathologists.

“Our study demonstrates that machine learning can achieve high performance on a challenging image classification task and has the potential to be an asset to lung cancer management,” says Hassanpour. “Clinical implementation of our system would be able to assist pathologists for accurate classification of lung cancer subtypes, which is critical for prognosis and treatment.”

Source: Medical Xpress

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