In Silico Approach for Immunohistochemical Evaluation of a Cytoplasmic Marker in Breast Cancer

Breast cancer is the most frequently diagnosed cancer in women and the second most common cancer overall, with nearly [Formula: see text] million new cases worldwide every year. Breast cancer patients need accurate tools for early diagnosis and to improve treatment. Biomarkers are increasingly used to describe and evaluate tumours for prognosis, to facilitate and predict response to therapy and to evaluate residual tumor, post-treatment. Here, we evaluate different methods to separate Diaminobenzidine (DAB) from Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) staining for Wnt-1, a potential cytoplasmic breast cancer biomarker. A method comprising clustering and Color deconvolution allowed us to recognize and quantify Wnt-1 levels accurately at pixel levels. Experimental validation was conducted using a set of 12,288 blocks of [Formula: see text] pixels without overlap, extracted from a Tissue Microarray (TMA) composed of 192 tissue cores. Intraclass Correlations (ICC) among evaluators of the data of [Formula: see text] , [Formula: see text] , [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] for each Allred class and an average ICC of [Formula: see text] among evaluators and automatic classification were obtained. Furthermore, this method received an average rating of [Formula: see text] out of 5 in the Wnt-1 segmentation process from the evaluators.