Publications by authors named "Maximilian Leitheiser"

Salivary gland tumors are diagnostically challenging due to major diversity of benign and malignant tumors with enormous intra-tumorous and inter-tumorous heterogeneity and, hence, frequently overlapping histologic features. DNA methylation has greatly enhanced tumor classification in several organs and led to the identification of previously unrecognized entities. In a recent study on DNA methylation of salivary gland tumors, we had identified a group of unclassifiable tumors.

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Article Synopsis
  • Tumors of salivary glands vary widely and can overlap, making them challenging to diagnose, despite advances in molecular testing.
  • A study examined 363 cases of 20 different salivary gland tumors and found distinct DNA methylation patterns that help classify these tumors, achieving high accuracy with a machine learning algorithm.
  • The research identified specific epigenetic signatures, distinguishing certain tumor types, and suggested that DNA methylation could aid in diagnosing and potentially uncovering new tumor classes in the future.
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The diagnosis of ependymoma has moved from a purely histopathological review with limited prognostic value to an integrated diagnosis, relying heavily on molecular information. However, as the integrated approach is still novel and some molecular ependymoma subtypes are quite rare, few studies have correlated integrated pathology and clinical outcome, often focusing on small series of single molecular types. We collected data from 2023 ependymomas as classified by DNA methylation profiling, consisting of 1736 previously published and 287 unpublished methylation profiles.

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The diagnosis of sinonasal tumors is challenging due to a heterogeneous spectrum of various differential diagnoses as well as poorly defined, disputed entities such as sinonasal undifferentiated carcinomas (SNUCs). In this study, we apply a machine learning algorithm based on DNA methylation patterns to classify sinonasal tumors with clinical-grade reliability. We further show that sinonasal tumors with SNUC morphology are not as undifferentiated as their current terminology suggests but rather reassigned to four distinct molecular classes defined by epigenetic, mutational and proteomic profiles.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study aimed to assess how effective DNA methylation analysis and machine learning are at distinguishing pleural mesothelioma (PM) from similar diseases and cancers like lung adenocarcinomas and chronic pleuritis.
  • Researchers utilized DNA methylation data and trained machine learning models (random forest and support vector machine) to improve diagnostic accuracy, achieving up to 97.8% accuracy with the support vector machine during validation.
  • Results indicated that while PM can be differentiated from certain lung cancers, it often overlaps with chronic pleuritis, and specific hypermethylated tumor suppressor genes were identified in PM specimens.
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In head and neck squamous cell cancers (HNSCs) that present as metastases with an unknown primary (HNSC-CUPs), the identification of a primary tumor improves therapy options and increases patient survival. However, the currently available diagnostic methods are laborious and do not offer a sufficient detection rate. Predictive machine learning models based on DNA methylation profiles have recently emerged as a promising technique for tumor classification.

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Purpose: Phenotype information is crucial for the interpretation of genomic variants. So far it has only been accessible for bioinformatics workflows after encoding into clinical terms by expert dysmorphologists.

Methods: Here, we introduce an approach driven by artificial intelligence that uses portrait photographs for the interpretation of clinical exome data.

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