Joint Multi-task Learning Improves Weakly-Supervised Biomarker Prediction in Computational Pathology

Research output: Contribution to book/Conference proceedings/Anthology/ReportConference contributionContributedpeer-review

Contributors

Abstract

Deep Learning (DL) can predict biomarkers directly from digitized cancer histology in a weakly-supervised setting. Recently, the prediction of continuous biomarkers through regression-based DL has seen an increasing interest. Nonetheless, clinical decision making often requires a categorical outcome. Consequently, we developed a weakly-supervised joint multi-task Transformer architecture which has been trained and evaluated on four public patient cohorts for the prediction of two key predictive biomarkers, microsatellite instability (MSI) and homologous recombination deficiency (HRD), trained with auxiliary regression tasks related to the tumor microenvironment. Moreover, we perform a comprehensive benchmark of 16 task balancing approaches for weakly-supervised joint multi-task learning in computational pathology. Using our novel approach, we outperform the state of the art by +7.7% and +4.1% as measured by the area under the receiver operating characteristic, and enhance clustering of latent embeddings by +8% and +5%, for the prediction of MSI and HRD in external cohorts, respectively.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationMedical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention – MICCAI 2024 - 27th International Conference, Proceedings
EditorsMarius George Linguraru, Qi Dou, Aasa Feragen, Stamatia Giannarou, Ben Glocker, Karim Lekadir, Julia A. Schnabel
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media B.V.
Pages254-262
Number of pages9
ISBN (print)9783031720826
Publication statusPublished - 2024
Peer-reviewedYes

Publication series

SeriesLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume15004 LNCS
ISSN0302-9743

Conference

Title27th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention, MICCAI 2024
Duration6 - 10 October 2024
CityMarrakesh
CountryMorocco

Keywords

Sustainable Development Goals

Keywords

  • Joint-learning, Multi-task, Pathology, Weakly-supervised