Background: Breast terminal duct lobular units (TDLUs), the source of most breast cancer (BC) precursors, are shaped by age-related involution, a gradual process, and postpartum involution (PPI), a dramatic inflammatory process that restores baseline microanatomy after weaning. Dysregulated PPI is implicated in the pathogenesis of postpartum BCs. We propose that assessment of TDLUs in the postpartum period may have value in risk estimation, but characteristics of these tissues in relation to epidemiological factors are incompletely described.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBreast Cancer Res Treat
July 2022
Purpose: Breast terminal duct lobular units (TDLUs) are the main source of breast cancer (BC) precursors. Higher serum concentrations of hormones and growth factors have been linked to increased TDLU numbers and to elevated BC risk, with variable effects by menopausal status. We assessed associations of circulating factors with breast histology among premenopausal women using artificial intelligence (AI) and preliminarily tested whether parity modifies associations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: Computational algorithms for the interpretation of laboratory test results can support physicians and specialists in laboratory medicine. The aim of this study was to develop, implement and evaluate a machine learning algorithm that automatically assesses the risk of low body iron storage, reflected by low ferritin plasma levels, in anemic primary care patients using a minimal set of basic laboratory tests, namely complete blood count and C-reactive protein (CRP).
Methods: Laboratory measurements of anemic primary care patients were used to develop and validate a machine learning algorithm.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become of increasing interest over the past decade. While digital image analysis (DIA) is already being used in radiology, it is still in its infancy in pathology. One of the reasons is that large-scale digitization of glass slides has only recently become available.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFConvolutional neural networks (CNNs) offer the potential to generate comprehensive quantitative analysis of histologic features. Diagnostic reporting of benign breast disease (BBD) biopsies is usually limited to subjective assessment of the most severe lesion in a sample, while ignoring the vast majority of tissue features, including involution of background terminal duct lobular units (TDLUs), the structures from which breast cancers arise. Studies indicate that increased levels of age-related TDLU involution in BBD biopsies predict lower breast cancer risk, and therefore its assessment may have potential value in risk assessment and management.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFVariation between stains in histopathology is commonplace across different medical centers. This can have a significant effect on the reliability of machine learning algorithms. In this paper, we propose to reduce performance variability by using -consistent generative adversarial (CycleGAN) networks to remove staining variation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe tumour microenvironment has been shown to be a valuable source of prognostic information for different cancer types. This holds in particular for triple negative breast cancer (TNBC), a breast cancer subtype for which currently no prognostic biomarkers are established. Although different methods to assess tumour infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) have been published, it remains unclear which method (marker, region) yields the most optimal prognostic information.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlgorithms can improve the objectivity and efficiency of histopathologic slide analysis. In this paper, we investigated the impact of scanning systems (scanners) and cycle-GAN-based normalization on algorithm performance, by comparing different deep learning models to automatically detect prostate cancer in whole-slide images. Specifically, we compare U-Net, DenseNet and EfficientNet.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The Gleason score is the strongest correlating predictor of recurrence for prostate cancer, but has substantial inter-observer variability, limiting its usefulness for individual patients. Specialised urological pathologists have greater concordance; however, such expertise is not widely available. Prostate cancer diagnostics could thus benefit from robust, reproducible Gleason grading.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The development of deep neural networks is facilitating more advanced digital analysis of histopathologic images. We trained a convolutional neural network for multiclass segmentation of digitized kidney tissue sections stained with periodic acid-Schiff (PAS).
Methods: We trained the network using multiclass annotations from 40 whole-slide images of stained kidney transplant biopsies and applied it to four independent data sets.
Hypomagnesemia (blood Mg concentration <0.7 mM) is a common electrolyte disorder in patients with type 2 diabetes (T2D), but the etiology remains largely unknown. In patients with T2D, reduced blood Mg levels are associated with an increased decline in renal function, independent of glycemic control and hypertension.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAutomatic detection of pulmonary nodules in thoracic computed tomography (CT) scans has been an active area of research for the last two decades. However, there have only been few studies that provide a comparative performance evaluation of different systems on a common database. We have therefore set up the LUNA16 challenge, an objective evaluation framework for automatic nodule detection algorithms using the largest publicly available reference database of chest CT scans, the LIDC-IDRI data set.
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