Deep learning-based tumor microenvironment segmentation is predictive of tumor mutations and patient survival in non-small-cell lung cancer

BACKGROUND: Despite the fact that tumor microenvironment (TME) and gene mutations are the main determinants of progression of the deadliest cancer in the world – lung cancer, their interrelations are not well understood. Digital pathology data provides a unique insight into the spatial composition of the TME. Various spatial metrics and machine learning approaches were proposed for prediction of either patient survival or gene mutations from this data. Still, these approaches are limited in the scope of analyzed features and in their explainability, and as such fail to transfer to clinical practice. METHODS: Here, we generated 23,199 image patches from 26 hematoxylin-and-eosin (H&E)-stained lung cancer tissue sections and annotated them into 9 different tissue classes. Using this dataset, we trained a deep neural network ARA-CNN. Next, we applied the trained network to segment 467 lung cancer H&E images from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database. We used the segmented images to compute human-interpretable features reflecting the heterogeneous composition of the TME, and successfully utilized them to predict patient survival and cancer gene mutations. RESULTS: We achieved per-class AUC ranging from 0.72 to 0.99 for classifying tissue types in lung cancer with ARA-CNN. Machine learning models trained on the proposed human-interpretable features achieved a c-index of 0.723 in the task of survival prediction and AUC up to 73.5% for PDGFRB in the task of mutation classification. CONCLUSIONS: We presented a framework that accurately predicted survival and gene mutations in lung adenocarcinoma patients based on human-interpretable features extracted from H&E slides. Our approach can provide important insights for designing novel cancer treatments, by linking the spatial structure of the TME in lung adenocarcinoma to gene mutations and patient survival. It can also expand our understanding of the effects that the TME has on tumor evolutionary processes. Our approach can be generalized to different cancer types to inform precision medicine strategies. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12885-022-10081-w.