Deep learning for evaluation of microvascular invasion in hepatocellular carcinoma from tumor areas of histology images

Abstract

Abstract Background Microvascular invasion (MVI) is essential for the management of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). However, MVI is hard to evaluate in patients without sufficient peri-tumoral tissue samples, which account for over a half of HCC patients. Methods We established an MVI deep-learning (MVI-DL) model with a weakly supervised multiple-instance learning framework, to evaluate MVI status using only tumor tissues from the histological whole slide images (WSIs). A total of 350 HCC patients (2917 WSIs) from the First Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University (FAHSYSU cohort) were divided into a training and test set. One hundred and twenty patients (504 WSIs) from Dongguan People’s Hospital and Shunde Hospital of Southern Medical University (DG-SD cohort) formed an external test set. Unsupervised clustering and class activation mapping were applied to visualize the key histological features. Results In the FAHSYSU and DG-SD test set, the MVI-DL model achieved an AUC of 0.904 (95% CI 0.888–0.920) and 0.871 (95% CI 0.837–0.905), respectively. Visualization results showed that macrotrabecular architecture with rich blood sinus, rich tumor stroma and high intratumor heterogeneity were identified as the key features associated with MVI ( +), whereas severe immune infiltration and highly differentiated tumor cells were associated with MVI (−). In the simulation of patients with only one WSI or biopsies only, the AUC of the MVI-DL model reached 0.875 (95% CI 0.855–0.895) and 0.879 (95% CI 0.853–0.906), respectively. Conclusion The effective, interpretable MVI-DL model has potential as an important tool with practical clinical applicability in evaluating MVI status from the tumor areas on the histological slides. Graphical abstract