Zhang, H;
AbdulJabbar, K;
Grunewald, T;
Akarca, AU;
Hagos, Y;
Sobhani, F;
Lecat, CSY;
... Yuan, Y; + view all
(2023)
Self-supervised deep learning for highly efficient spatial immunophenotyping.
eBioMedicine
, 95
, Article 104769. 10.1016/j.ebiom.2023.104769.
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Abstract
Background: Efficient biomarker discovery and clinical translation depend on the fast and accurate analytical output from crucial technologies such as multiplex imaging. However, reliable cell classification often requires extensive annotations. Label-efficient strategies are urgently needed to reveal diverse cell distribution and spatial interactions in large-scale multiplex datasets. / Methods: This study proposed Self-supervised Learning for Antigen Detection (SANDI) for accurate cell phenotyping while mitigating the annotation burden. The model first learns intrinsic pairwise similarities in unlabelled cell images, followed by a classification step to map learnt features to cell labels using a small set of annotated references. We acquired four multiplex immunohistochemistry datasets and one imaging mass cytometry dataset, comprising 2825 to 15,258 single-cell images to train and test the model. / Findings: With 1% annotations (18–114 cells), SANDI achieved weighted F1-scores ranging from 0.82 to 0.98 across the five datasets, which was comparable to the fully supervised classifier trained on 1828–11,459 annotated cells (−0.002 to −0.053 of averaged weighted F1-score, Wilcoxon rank-sum test, P = 0.31). Leveraging the immune checkpoint markers stained in ovarian cancer slides, SANDI-based cell identification reveals spatial expulsion between PD1-expressing T helper cells and T regulatory cells, suggesting an interplay between PD1 expression and T regulatory cell-mediated immunosuppression. / Interpretation: By striking a fine balance between minimal expert guidance and the power of deep learning to learn similarity within abundant data, SANDI presents new opportunities for efficient, large-scale learning for histology multiplex imaging data. / Funding: This study was funded by the Royal Marsden/ ICR National Institute of Health Research Biomedical Research Centre.
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