Faculty, Staff and Student Publications
Publication Date
5-13-2022
Journal
Cancers
Abstract
Identifying the progression of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) to accelerated CLL (aCLL) or transformation to diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (Richter transformation; RT) has significant clinical implications as it prompts a major change in patient management. However, the differentiation between these disease phases may be challenging in routine practice. Unsupervised learning has gained increased attention because of its substantial potential in data intrinsic pattern discovery. Here, we demonstrate that cellular feature engineering, identifying cellular phenotypes via unsupervised clustering, provides the most robust analytic performance in analyzing digitized pathology slides (accuracy = 0.925, AUC = 0.978) when compared to alternative approaches, such as mixed features, supervised features, unsupervised/mixed/supervised feature fusion and selection, as well as patch-based convolutional neural network (CNN) feature extraction. We further validate the reproducibility and robustness of unsupervised feature extraction via stability and repeated splitting analysis, supporting its utility as a diagnostic aid in identifying CLL patients with histologic evidence of disease progression. The outcome of this study serves as proof of principle using an unsupervised machine learning scheme to enhance the diagnostic accuracy of the heterogeneous histology patterns that pathologists might not easily see.
Keywords
Richter transformation (RT), accelerated CLL, cellular feature engineering, chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), disease progression, feature fusion, feature selection, large cell transformation, unsupervised clustering
DOI
10.3390/cancers14102398
PMID
35626003
PMCID
PMC9139505
PubMedCentral® Posted Date
5-13-2022
PubMedCentral® Full Text Version
Post-print
Published Open-Access
yes
Included in
Bioinformatics Commons, Biomedical Informatics Commons, Genetic Phenomena Commons, Medical Genetics Commons, Oncology Commons