Pan-cancer computational histopathology reveals mutations, tumor composition and prognosis

Abstract

Here we use deep transfer learning to quantify histopathological patterns across 17,396 H&E stained histopathology image slides from 28 cancer types and correlate these with underlying genomic and transcriptomic data. Pan-cancer computational histopathology (PC-CHiP) classifies the tissue origin across organ sites and provides highly accurate, spatially resolved tumor and normal distinction within a given slide. The learned computational histopathological features correlate with a large range of recurrent genetic aberrations, including whole genome duplications (WGDs), arm-level copy number gains and losses, focal amplifications and deletions as well as driver gene mutations within a range of cancer types. WGDs can be predicted in 25/27 cancer types (mean AUC=0.79) including those that were not part of model training. Similarly, we observe associations with 25% of mRNA transcript levels, which enables to learn and localise histopathological patterns of molecularly defined cell types on each slide. Lastly, we find that computational histopathology provides prognostic information augmenting histopathological subtyping and grading in the majority of cancers assessed, which pinpoints prognostically relevant areas such as necrosis or infiltrating lymphocytes on each tumour section. Taken together, these findings highlight the large potential of PC-CHiP to discover new molecular and prognostic associations, which can augment diagnostic workflows and lay out a rationale for integrating molecular and histopathological data.