Nature Communications (Jul 2021)

The impact of site-specific digital histology signatures on deep learning model accuracy and bias

  • Frederick M. Howard,
  • James Dolezal,
  • Sara Kochanny,
  • Jefree Schulte,
  • Heather Chen,
  • Lara Heij,
  • Dezheng Huo,
  • Rita Nanda,
  • Olufunmilayo I. Olopade,
  • Jakob N. Kather,
  • Nicole Cipriani,
  • Robert L. Grossman,
  • Alexander T. Pearson

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-24698-1
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 12, no. 1
pp. 1 – 13

Abstract

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Deep learning models have been trained on The Cancer Genome Atlas to predict numerous features directly from histology, including survival, gene expression patterns, and driver mutations. Here, the authors demonstrate that site-specific histologic signatures can lead to biased estimates of accuracy for such models, and propose a method to minimize such bias.