» Articles » PMID: 38961276

A Deep-learning Framework to Predict Cancer Treatment Response from Histopathology Images Through Imputed Transcriptomics

Abstract

Advances in artificial intelligence have paved the way for leveraging hematoxylin and eosin-stained tumor slides for precision oncology. We present ENLIGHT-DeepPT, an indirect two-step approach consisting of (1) DeepPT, a deep-learning framework that predicts genome-wide tumor mRNA expression from slides, and (2) ENLIGHT, which predicts response to targeted and immune therapies from the inferred expression values. We show that DeepPT successfully predicts transcriptomics in all 16 The Cancer Genome Atlas cohorts tested and generalizes well to two independent datasets. ENLIGHT-DeepPT successfully predicts true responders in five independent patient cohorts involving four different treatments spanning six cancer types, with an overall odds ratio of 2.28 and a 39.5% increased response rate among predicted responders versus the baseline rate. Notably, its prediction accuracy, obtained without any training on the treatment data, is comparable to that achieved by directly predicting the response from the images, which requires specific training on the treatment evaluation cohorts.

Citing Articles

Hallmarks of artificial intelligence contributions to precision oncology.

Chang T, Park S, Schaffer A, Jiang P, Ruppin E Nat Cancer. 2025; .

PMID: 40055572 DOI: 10.1038/s43018-025-00917-2.


Ligand-receptor interactions combined with histopathology for improved prognostic modeling in HPV-negative head and neck squamous cell carcinoma.

Feng B, Zhao D, Zhang Z, Jia R, Schuler P, Hess J NPJ Precis Oncol. 2025; 9(1):57.

PMID: 40021759 PMC: 11871237. DOI: 10.1038/s41698-025-00844-6.


Invasion and metastasis in cancer: molecular insights and therapeutic targets.

Li Y, Liu F, Cai Q, Deng L, OuYang Q, Zhang X Signal Transduct Target Ther. 2025; 10(1):57.

PMID: 39979279 PMC: 11842613. DOI: 10.1038/s41392-025-02148-4.


Machine learning methods for histopathological image analysis: Updates in 2024.

Komura D, Ochi M, Ishikawa S Comput Struct Biotechnol J. 2025; 27:383-400.

PMID: 39897057 PMC: 11786909. DOI: 10.1016/j.csbj.2024.12.033.


Evolution of Artificial Intelligence in Medical Education From 2000 to 2024: Bibliometric Analysis.

Li R, Wu T Interact J Med Res. 2025; 14:e63775.

PMID: 39883926 PMC: 11826936. DOI: 10.2196/63775.


References
1.
Golub T, Slonim D, Tamayo P, Huard C, Gaasenbeek M, Mesirov J . Molecular classification of cancer: class discovery and class prediction by gene expression monitoring. Science. 1999; 286(5439):531-7. DOI: 10.1126/science.286.5439.531. View

2.
Curtis C, Shah S, Chin S, Turashvili G, Rueda O, Dunning M . The genomic and transcriptomic architecture of 2,000 breast tumours reveals novel subgroups. Nature. 2012; 486(7403):346-52. PMC: 3440846. DOI: 10.1038/nature10983. View

3.
Doroshow D, Doroshow J . Genomics and the History of Precision Oncology. Surg Oncol Clin N Am. 2019; 29(1):35-49. PMC: 6878897. DOI: 10.1016/j.soc.2019.08.003. View

4.
Rosenthal J, Carelli R, Omar M, Brundage D, Halbert E, Nyman J . Building Tools for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in Cancer Research: Best Practices and a Case Study with the PathML Toolkit for Computational Pathology. Mol Cancer Res. 2021; 20(2):202-206. PMC: 9127877. DOI: 10.1158/1541-7786.MCR-21-0665. View

5.
Strom P, Kartasalo K, Olsson H, Solorzano L, Delahunt B, Berney D . Artificial intelligence for diagnosis and grading of prostate cancer in biopsies: a population-based, diagnostic study. Lancet Oncol. 2020; 21(2):222-232. DOI: 10.1016/S1470-2045(19)30738-7. View