Employing Graph Representations for Cell-Level Characterization of Melanoma MELC Samples

Luis Carlos Rivera Monroy, Leonhard Rist, Martin Eberhardt, Christian Ostalecki, Andreas Baur, Julio Vera, Katharina Breininger, Andreas Maier

Abstract: Histopathology imaging is crucial for the diagnosis and treatment of skin diseases. For this reason, computer-assisted approaches have gained popularity and shown promising results in tasks such as segmentation and classification of skin disorders. However, collecting essential data and sufficiently high-quality annotations is a challenge. This work describes a pipeline that uses suspected melanoma samples that have been characterized using Multi-Epitope-Ligand Cartography (MELC). This cellular level characterization of the tissue is then represented as a graph and finally used to train a graph neural network. This imaging technology, combined with the methodology proposed in this work, achieves a classification accuracy of 87 %, outperforming existing approaches by 10 %.