A universal immunohistochemistry analyzer for generalizing AI-driven assessment of immunohistochemistry across immunostains and cancer types

Biagio Brattoli, Mohammad Mostafavi, Taebum Lee, Wonkyung Jung, Jeongun Ryu, Seonwook Park, Jongchan Park, Sergio Pereira, Seunghwan Shin, Sangjoon Choi, Hyojin Kim, Donggeun Yoo, Siraj M. Ali, Kyunghyun Paeng, Chan-Young Ock, Soo Ick Cho, Seokhwi Kim

Abstract: Immunohistochemistry (IHC) is the common companion diagnostics in targeted therapies. However, quantifying protein expressions in IHC images present a significant challenge, due to variability in manual scoring and inherent subjective interpretation. Deep learning (DL) offers a promising approach to address these issues, though current models require extensive training for each cancer and IHC type, limiting the practical application. We developed a Universal IHC (UIHC) analyzer, a DL-based tool that quantifies protein expression across different cancers and IHC types. This multi-cohort trained model outperformed conventional single-cohort models in analyzing unseen IHC images (Kappa score 0.578 vs. up to 0.509) and demonstrated consistent performance across varying positive staining cutoff values. In a discovery application, the UIHC model assigned higher tumor proportion scores to MET amplification cases, but not MET exon 14 splicing or other non-small cell lung cancer cases. This UIHC model represents a novel role for DL that further advances quantitative analysis of IHC.

External IDs:doi:10.1038/s41698-024-00770-z