Liquid biopsies (eg., blood draws) offer a less invasive and non-localized alternative to tissue biopsies for monitoring the progression of metastatic breast cancer (mBCa). Immunofluoresence (IF) microscopy is a tool to image and analyze millions of blood cells in a patient sample. By detecting and genetically sequencing circulating tumor cells (CTCs) in the blood, personalized treatment plans are achievable for various cancer subtypes. However, CTCs are rare (about 1 in 2M), making manual CTC detection very difficult. In addition, clinicians rely on quantitative cellular biomarkers to manually classify CTCs. This requires prior tasks of cell detection, segmentation and feature extraction. To assist clinicians, we have developed a fully automated machine learning-based production-level pipeline to efficiently detect, segment and classify CTCs in multi-channel IF images. We achieve over 99% sensitivity and 97% specificity on 9,533 cells from 15 mBCa patients. Our pipeline has been successfully deployed on real mBCa patients, reducing a patient average of 14M detected cells to only 335 CTC candidates for manual review.
@article{arxiv.2410.02988,
title = {Fully Automated CTC Detection, Segmentation and Classification for Multi-Channel IF Imaging},
author = {Evan Schwab and Bharat Annaldas and Nisha Ramesh and Anna Lundberg and Vishal Shelke and Xinran Xu and Cole Gilbertson and Jiyun Byun and Ernest T. Lam},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.02988},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
Published in MICCAI 2024 MOVI Workshop Conference Proceedings