Automated Volume Corrected Mitotic Index Calculation Through Annotation-Free Deep Learning using Immunohistochemistry as Reference Standard

Abstract

The volume-corrected mitotic index (M/V-Index) was shown to provide prognostic value in invasive breast carcinomas. However, despite its prognostic significance, it is not established as the standard method for assessing aggressive biological behaviour, due to the high additional workload associated with determining the epithelial proportion. In this work, we show that using a deep learning pipeline solely trained with an annotation-free, immunohistochemistry-based approach, provides accurate estimations of epithelial segmentation in canine breast carcinomas. We compare our automatic framework with the manually annotated M/V-Index in a study with three board-certified pathologists. Our results indicate that the deep learning-based pipeline shows expert-level performance, while providing time efficiency and reproducibility.