Deep Learning for Grading Endometrial Cancer

Endometrial cancer is the fourth most common cancer in women in the United States; the lifetime risk for developing this disease is approximately 2.8%. Precise histologic evaluation and molecular classification of endometrial cancer are important for effective patient management and determining the best treatment modalities. This study introduces EndoNet, which uses convolutional neural networks for extracting histologic features and a vision transformer for aggregating these features and classifying slides based on their visual characteristics into high- and low-grade cases. The model was trained on 929 digitized hematoxylin and eosin-stained whole-slide images of endometrial cancer from hysterectomy cases at Dartmouth-Health. It classifies these slides into low-grade (endometrioid grades 1 and 2) and high-grade (endometrioid carcinoma International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics grade 3, uterine serous carcinoma, or carcinosarcoma) categories. EndoNet was evaluated on an internal test set of 110 patients and an external test set of 100 patients from The Cancer Genome Atlas public database. The model achieved a weighted average F1 score of 0.91 (95% CI, 0.86 to 0.95) and an area under the curve of 0.95 (95% CI, 0.89 to 0.99) on the internal test, and 0.86 (95% CI, 0.80 to 0.94) for F1 score and 0.86 (95% CI, 0.75 to 0.93) for area under the curve on the external test. Pending further validation, EndoNet has the potential to support pathologists without the need of manual annotations in classifying the grades of gynecologic pathology tumors.