and tluedde@ukaachen.de 34 35 Precision treatment of cancer relies on genetic alterations which are diagnosed by molecular 36 biology assays. 1 These tests can be a bottleneck in oncology workflows because of high turna-37 round time, tissue usage and costs. 2 Here, we show that deep learning can predict point muta-38 tions, molecular tumor subtypes and immune-related gene expression signatures 3,4 directly 39 from routine histological images of tumor tissue. We developed and systematically optimized 40 a one-stop-shop workflow and applied it to more than 4000 patients with breast 5 , colon and 41 rectal 6 , head and neck 7 , lung 8,9 , pancreatic 10 , prostate 11 cancer, melanoma 12 and gastric 13 can-42 cer. Together, our findings show that a single deep learning algorithm can predict clinically ac-43 tionable alterations from routine histology data. Our method can be implemented on mobile 44 hardware 14 , potentially enabling point-of-care diagnostics for personalized cancer treatment 45 in individual patients. 46 Clinical guidelines recommend molecular testing of tumor tissue for most patients with advanced 47 209 The results are in part based upon data generated by the TCGA Research Network: http://can-210 cergenome.nih.gov/. Our funding sources are as follows. J.N.K.: RWTH University Aachen (START 211
Background: Fibroblast growth factor receptor (FGFR) inhibitor treatment has become the first clinically approved targeted therapy in bladder cancer. However, it requires previous molecular testing of each patient, which is costly and not ubiquitously available. Objective: To determine whether an artificial intelligence system is able to predict mutations of the FGFR3 gene directly from routine histology slides of bladder cancer. Design, setting, and participants: We trained a deep learning network to detect FGFR3 mutations on digitized slides of muscle-invasive bladder cancers stained with hematoxylin and eosin from the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) cohort (n = 327) and validated the algorithm on the "Aachen" cohort (n = 182; n = 121 pT2-4, n = 34 stroma-invasive pT1, and n = 27 noninvasive pTa tumors). Outcome measurements and statistical analysis: The primary endpoint was the area under the receiver operating curve (AUROC) for mutation detection. Performance of the deep learning system was compared with visual scoring by an uropathologist. Results and limitations: In the TCGA cohort, FGFR3 mutations were detected with an AUROC of 0.701 (p < 0.0001). In the Aachen cohort, FGFR3 mutants were found with an AUROC of 0.725 (p < 0.0001). When trained on TCGA, the network generalized to the Aachen cohort, and detected FGFR3 mutants with an AUROC of 0.625 (p = 0.0112). A subgroup analysis and histological evaluation found highest accuracy in papillary growth, luminal gene expression subtypes, females, and American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) stage II tumors. In a head-to-head comparison, the deep learning system outperformed the uropathologist in detecting FGFR3 mutants. Conclusions: Our computer-based artificial intelligence system was able to detect genetic alterations of the FGFR3 gene of bladder cancer patients directly from histological slides. In the future, this system could be used to preselect patients for further molecular testing. However, analyses of larger, multicenter, muscle-invasive bladder cancer cohorts are now needed in order to validate and extend our findings.
Classical mathematical models of tumor growth have shaped our understanding of cancer and have broad practical implications for treatment scheduling and dosage. However, even the simplest textbook models have been barely validated in real world-data of human patients. In this study, we fitted a range of differential equation models to tumor volume measurements of patients undergoing chemotherapy or cancer immunotherapy for solid tumors. We used a large dataset of 1472 patients with three or more measurements per target lesion, of which 652 patients had six or more data points. We show that the early treatment response shows only moderate correlation with the final treatment response, demonstrating the need for nuanced models. We then perform a head-to-head comparison of six classical models which are widely used in the field: the Exponential, Logistic, Classic Bertalanffy, General Bertalanffy, Classic Gompertz and General Gompertz model. Several models provide a good fit to tumor volume measurements, with the Gompertz model providing the best balance between goodness of fit and number of parameters. Similarly, when fitting to early treatment data, the general Bertalanffy and Gompertz models yield the lowest mean absolute error to forecasted data, indicating that these models could potentially be effective at predicting treatment outcome. In summary, we provide a quantitative benchmark for classical textbook models and state-of-the art models of human tumor growth. We publicly release an anonymized version of our original data, providing the first benchmark set of human tumor growth data for evaluation of mathematical models.
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