A pathologist-in-the-loop IHC antibody test selection using the entropy-based probabilistic method

BACKGROUND: Immunohistochemistry (IHC) is an important tool to identify and quantify expression of certain proteins (antigens) to gain insights into the molecular processes in a diseased tissue. However, it is a challenge for pathologists to remember the discriminative characteristics of the growing number of such antigens across multiple diseases. The complexity of their expression patterns, fueled by continuous discoveries in molecular pathology, gives rise to a combinatorial explosion that places an unprecedented burden on a practicing pathologist and therefore increases cost and variability of IHC studies. MATERIALS AND METHODS: To tackle these issues, we have developed antibody test optimized selection method, a novel informatics tool to help pathologists in improving the IHC antibody selection process. The method uses extensions of Shannon's information entropies and Bayesian probabilities to dynamically build an efficient diagnostic tree. RESULTS: A comparative analysis of our method with the expert and World Health Organization classification guidelines showed that the proposed method brings threefold reduction in number of antibody tests required to reach a diagnostic conclusion. CONCLUSION: The developed method can significantly streamline the antibody test selection process, decrease associated costs and reduce inter- and intrapathologist variability in IHC decision-making.