Weakly supervised prostate tma classification via graph convolutional networks

Histology-based grade classification is clinically important for many cancer types in stratifying patients into distinct treatment groups. In prostate cancer, the Gleason score is a grading system used to measure the aggressiveness of prostate cancer from the spatial organization of cells and the distribution of glands. However, the subjective interpretation of Glea-son score often suffers from large interobserver and intraob-server variability. Previous work in deep learning-based objective Gleason grading requires manual pixel-level annotation. In this work, we propose a weakly-supervised approach for grade classification in tissue micro-arrays (TMA) using graph convolutional networks (GCNs), in which we model the spatial organization of cells as a graph to better capture the proliferation and community structure of tumor cells. We learn the morphometry of each cell using a contrastive predictive coding (CPC)-based self-supervised approach. Using five-fold cross-validation we demonstrate that our method can achieve a 0.9637 ± 0.0131 AUC using only TMA-level labels. Our method also demonstrates a 36.36% improvement in AUC over standard GCNs with texture features and a 15.48% improvement over GCNs with VGG19 features. Our proposed pipeline can be used to objectively stratify low and high-risk cases, reducing inter- and intra-observer variability and pathologist workload.