Evaluating deep learning-based melanoma classification using immunohistochemistry and routine histology: A three center study.

Pathologists routinely use immunohistochemical (IHC)-stained tissue slides against MelanA in addition to hematoxylin and eosin (H&E)-stained slides to improve their accuracy in diagnosing melanomas. The use of diagnostic Deep Learning (DL)-based support systems for automated examination of tissu...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Christoph Wies, Lucas Schneider, Sarah Haggenmüller, Tabea-Clara Bucher, Sarah Hobelsberger, Markus V Heppt, Gerardo Ferrara, Eva I Krieghoff-Henning, Titus J Brinker
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2024-01-01
Series:PLoS ONE
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0297146
Description
Summary:Pathologists routinely use immunohistochemical (IHC)-stained tissue slides against MelanA in addition to hematoxylin and eosin (H&E)-stained slides to improve their accuracy in diagnosing melanomas. The use of diagnostic Deep Learning (DL)-based support systems for automated examination of tissue morphology and cellular composition has been well studied in standard H&E-stained tissue slides. In contrast, there are few studies that analyze IHC slides using DL. Therefore, we investigated the separate and joint performance of ResNets trained on MelanA and corresponding H&E-stained slides. The MelanA classifier achieved an area under receiver operating characteristics curve (AUROC) of 0.82 and 0.74 on out of distribution (OOD)-datasets, similar to the H&E-based benchmark classification of 0.81 and 0.75, respectively. A combined classifier using MelanA and H&E achieved AUROCs of 0.85 and 0.81 on the OOD datasets. DL MelanA-based assistance systems show the same performance as the benchmark H&E classification and may be improved by multi stain classification to assist pathologists in their clinical routine.
ISSN:1932-6203