Deep learning-based diagnosis and survival prediction of patients with renal cell carcinoma from primary whole slide images

There is an urgent clinical demand to explore novel diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers for renal cell carcinoma (RCC). We proposed deep learning-based artificial intelligence strategies. The study included 1752 whole slide images from multiple centres.

Based on the pixel-level of RCC segmentation, the diagnosis diagnostic model achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.977 (95% CI 0.969–0.984) in the external validation cohort. In addition, our diagnostic model exhibited excellent performance in the differential diagnosis of RCC from renal oncocytoma, which achieved an AUC of 0.951 (0.922–0.972). The grade_risk for the recognition of high-grade tumour achieved AUCs of 0.840 (0.805–0.871) in the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) cohort, 0.857 (0.813–0.894) in the Shanghai General Hospital (General) cohort, and 0.894 (0.842–0.933) in the Clinical Proteomic Tumor Analysis Consortium (CPTAC) cohort, for the recognition of high-grade tumour. The OS_risk for predicting 5-year survival status achieved an AUC of 0.784 (0.746–0.819) in the TCGA cohort, which was further verified in the independent general cohort and the CPTAC cohort, with AUCs of 0.774 (0.723–0.820) and 0.702 (0.632–0.765), respectively. Moreover, the competing-risk nomogram (CRN) showed its potential to be a prognostic indicator, with a hazard ratio (HR) of 5.664 (3.893–8.239, p<0.0001), outperforming other traditional clinical prognostic indicators. Kaplan–Meier survival analysis further illustrated that our CRN could significantly distinguish patients with high survival risk.

Deep learning-based artificial intelligence could be a useful tool for clinicians to diagnose and predict the prognosis of RCC patients, thus improving the process of individualised treatment.