A digital pathology workflow for the segmentation and classification of gastric glands: Study of gastric atrophy and intestinal metaplasia cases.

Gastric cancer is one of the most frequent causes of cancer-related deaths worldwide. Gastric atrophy (GA) and gastric intestinal metaplasia (IM) of the mucosa of the stomach have been found to increase the risk of gastric cancer and are considered precancerous lesions. Therefore, the early detectio...

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Main Authors: Panagiotis Barmpoutis, William Waddingham, Jing Yuan, Christopher Ross, Hamzeh Kayhanian, Tania Stathaki, Daniel C Alexander, Marnix Jansen
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2022-01-01
Series:PLoS ONE
Online Access:https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0275232&type=printable
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author Panagiotis Barmpoutis
William Waddingham
Jing Yuan
Christopher Ross
Hamzeh Kayhanian
Tania Stathaki
Daniel C Alexander
Marnix Jansen
author_facet Panagiotis Barmpoutis
William Waddingham
Jing Yuan
Christopher Ross
Hamzeh Kayhanian
Tania Stathaki
Daniel C Alexander
Marnix Jansen
author_sort Panagiotis Barmpoutis
collection DOAJ
description Gastric cancer is one of the most frequent causes of cancer-related deaths worldwide. Gastric atrophy (GA) and gastric intestinal metaplasia (IM) of the mucosa of the stomach have been found to increase the risk of gastric cancer and are considered precancerous lesions. Therefore, the early detection of GA and IM may have a valuable role in histopathological risk assessment. However, GA and IM are difficult to confirm endoscopically and, following the Sydney protocol, their diagnosis depends on the analysis of glandular morphology and on the identification of at least one well-defined goblet cell in a set of hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) -stained biopsy samples. To this end, the precise segmentation and classification of glands from the histological images plays an important role in the diagnostic confirmation of GA and IM. In this paper, we propose a digital pathology end-to-end workflow for gastric gland segmentation and classification for the analysis of gastric tissues. The proposed GAGL-VTNet, initially, extracts both global and local features combining multi-scale feature maps for the segmentation of glands and, subsequently, it adopts a vision transformer that exploits the visual dependences of the segmented glands towards their classification. For the analysis of gastric tissues, segmentation of mucosa is performed through an unsupervised model combining energy minimization and a U-Net model. Then, features of the segmented glands and mucosa are extracted and analyzed. To evaluate the efficiency of the proposed methodology we created the GAGL dataset consisting of 85 WSI, collected from 20 patients. The results demonstrate the existence of significant differences of the extracted features between normal, GA and IM cases. The proposed approach for gland and mucosa segmentation achieves an object dice score equal to 0.908 and 0.967 respectively, while for the classification of glands it achieves an F1 score equal to 0.94 showing great potential for the automated quantification and analysis of gastric biopsies.
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spelling doaj-art-46c14d77234c44d8a3e8f10dde255d602025-08-20T03:25:19ZengPublic Library of Science (PLoS)PLoS ONE1932-62032022-01-011712e027523210.1371/journal.pone.0275232A digital pathology workflow for the segmentation and classification of gastric glands: Study of gastric atrophy and intestinal metaplasia cases.Panagiotis BarmpoutisWilliam WaddinghamJing YuanChristopher RossHamzeh KayhanianTania StathakiDaniel C AlexanderMarnix JansenGastric cancer is one of the most frequent causes of cancer-related deaths worldwide. Gastric atrophy (GA) and gastric intestinal metaplasia (IM) of the mucosa of the stomach have been found to increase the risk of gastric cancer and are considered precancerous lesions. Therefore, the early detection of GA and IM may have a valuable role in histopathological risk assessment. However, GA and IM are difficult to confirm endoscopically and, following the Sydney protocol, their diagnosis depends on the analysis of glandular morphology and on the identification of at least one well-defined goblet cell in a set of hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) -stained biopsy samples. To this end, the precise segmentation and classification of glands from the histological images plays an important role in the diagnostic confirmation of GA and IM. In this paper, we propose a digital pathology end-to-end workflow for gastric gland segmentation and classification for the analysis of gastric tissues. The proposed GAGL-VTNet, initially, extracts both global and local features combining multi-scale feature maps for the segmentation of glands and, subsequently, it adopts a vision transformer that exploits the visual dependences of the segmented glands towards their classification. For the analysis of gastric tissues, segmentation of mucosa is performed through an unsupervised model combining energy minimization and a U-Net model. Then, features of the segmented glands and mucosa are extracted and analyzed. To evaluate the efficiency of the proposed methodology we created the GAGL dataset consisting of 85 WSI, collected from 20 patients. The results demonstrate the existence of significant differences of the extracted features between normal, GA and IM cases. The proposed approach for gland and mucosa segmentation achieves an object dice score equal to 0.908 and 0.967 respectively, while for the classification of glands it achieves an F1 score equal to 0.94 showing great potential for the automated quantification and analysis of gastric biopsies.https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0275232&type=printable
spellingShingle Panagiotis Barmpoutis
William Waddingham
Jing Yuan
Christopher Ross
Hamzeh Kayhanian
Tania Stathaki
Daniel C Alexander
Marnix Jansen
A digital pathology workflow for the segmentation and classification of gastric glands: Study of gastric atrophy and intestinal metaplasia cases.
PLoS ONE
title A digital pathology workflow for the segmentation and classification of gastric glands: Study of gastric atrophy and intestinal metaplasia cases.
title_full A digital pathology workflow for the segmentation and classification of gastric glands: Study of gastric atrophy and intestinal metaplasia cases.
title_fullStr A digital pathology workflow for the segmentation and classification of gastric glands: Study of gastric atrophy and intestinal metaplasia cases.
title_full_unstemmed A digital pathology workflow for the segmentation and classification of gastric glands: Study of gastric atrophy and intestinal metaplasia cases.
title_short A digital pathology workflow for the segmentation and classification of gastric glands: Study of gastric atrophy and intestinal metaplasia cases.
title_sort digital pathology workflow for the segmentation and classification of gastric glands study of gastric atrophy and intestinal metaplasia cases
url https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0275232&type=printable
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