Peyster EG, Arabyarmohammadi S, Janowczyk A, Azarianpour-Esfahani S, Sekulic M, Cassol C, Blower L, Parwani A, Lal P, Feldman MD, Margulies KB, Madabhushi A. An automated computational image analysis pipeline for histological grading of cardiac allograft rejection.
Eur Heart J 2021;
42:2356-2369. [PMID:
33982079 PMCID:
PMC8216729 DOI:
10.1093/eurheartj/ehab241]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 18] [Impact Index Per Article: 6.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Submit a Manuscript] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/30/2020] [Revised: 01/26/2021] [Accepted: 04/14/2021] [Indexed: 12/11/2022] Open
Abstract
AIM
Allograft rejection is a serious concern in heart transplant medicine. Though endomyocardial biopsy with histological grading is the diagnostic standard for rejection, poor inter-pathologist agreement creates significant clinical uncertainty. The aim of this investigation is to demonstrate that cellular rejection grades generated via computational histological analysis are on-par with those provided by expert pathologists.
METHODS AND RESULTS
The study cohort consisted of 2472 endomyocardial biopsy slides originating from three major US transplant centres. The 'Computer-Assisted Cardiac Histologic Evaluation (CACHE)-Grader' pipeline was trained using an interpretable, biologically inspired, 'hand-crafted' feature extraction approach. From a menu of 154 quantitative histological features relating the density and orientation of lymphocytes, myocytes, and stroma, a model was developed to reproduce the 4-grade clinical standard for cellular rejection diagnosis. CACHE-grader interpretations were compared with independent pathologists and the 'grade of record', testing for non-inferiority (δ = 6%). Study pathologists achieved a 60.7% agreement [95% confidence interval (CI): 55.2-66.0%] with the grade of record, and pair-wise agreement among all human graders was 61.5% (95% CI: 57.0-65.8%). The CACHE-Grader met the threshold for non-inferiority, achieving a 65.9% agreement (95% CI: 63.4-68.3%) with the grade of record and a 62.6% agreement (95% CI: 60.3-64.8%) with all human graders. The CACHE-Grader demonstrated nearly identical performance in internal and external validation sets (66.1% vs. 65.8%), resilience to inter-centre variations in tissue processing/digitization, and superior sensitivity for high-grade rejection (74.4% vs. 39.5%, P < 0.001).
CONCLUSION
These results show that the CACHE-grader pipeline, derived using intuitive morphological features, can provide expert-quality rejection grading, performing within the range of inter-grader variability seen among human pathologists.
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