Heterogeneity of computational pathomic signature predicts drug resistance and intra-tumor heterogeneity of ovarian cancer.

Background: Chemotherapy resistance is the main cause of ovarian cancer progression and even death. However, there are no clear indicators for predicting the risk of drug resistance in patients. Intra-tumor heterogeneity (ITH) is one of the characteristics of malignant tumors, which is associated with the treatment and prognosis of tumors. Accordingly, our study aims to investigate the correlation between the image features of intra-tumor heterogeneity and drug resistance of ovarian cancer based on artificial intelligence.

Methods: We obtained hematoxylin and eosin staining frozen histopathological images of ovarian cancer and paracarcinoma tissues from the Cancer Genome Atlas. We extracted quantitative image features of whole-slide images based on the automatic image nuclear segmentation processing technology. After that, we used bioinformatics analysis to find the relationship between image features of intra-tumor heterogeneity and drug resistance.

Results: Our results show that our automatic image processing process based on computer artificial intelligence can extract image features effectively, and the key image features extracted are closely related to ITH. Among them, the Perimeter.sd image feature with the most prominent ITH feature can accurately predict the risk of platinum-based chemotherapy drug resistance in ovarian cancer patients.

Conclusion: Automatic image processing and feature extraction based on artificial intelligence have excellent results. Perimeter.sd can be used as a useful image feature indicator for evaluating ITH. ITH is associated with drug resistance of ovarian cancer, so ITH characteristics can be used as an effective indicator to evaluate drug resistance in patients with ovarian cancer.