Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is a deadly hematological malignancy. Cellular morphology detection of bone marrow smears based on the French–American–British (FAB) classification system remains an essential criterion in the diagnosis of hematological malignancies. However, the diagnosis and discrimination of distinct FAB subtypes of AML obtained from bone marrow smear images are tedious and time-consuming. In addition, there is considerable variation within and among pathologists, particularly in rural areas, where pathologists may not have relevant expertise. Here, we established a comprehensive database encompassing 8245 bone marrow smear images from 651 patients based on a retrospective dual-center study between 2010 and 2021 for the purpose of training and testing. Furthermore, we developed AMLnet, a deep-learning pipeline based on bone marrow smear images, that can discriminate not only between AML patients and healthy individuals but also accurately identify various AML subtypes. AMLnet achieved an AUC of 0.885 at the image level and 0.921 at the patient level in distinguishing nine AML subtypes on the test dataset. Furthermore, AMLnet outperformed junior human experts and was comparable to senior experts on the test dataset at the patient level. Finally, we provided an interactive demo website to visualize the saliency maps and the results of AMLnet for aiding pathologists’ diagnosis. Collectively, AMLnet has the potential to serve as a fast prescreening and decision support tool for cytomorphological pathologists, especially in areas where pathologists are overburdened by medical demands as well as in rural areas where medical resources are scarce.
Zebin Yu and Jianhu Li have contributed equally to this work
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Abkürzungen
AML
Acute myeloid leukemia
FAB
French–American–British
AUC
Area under the receiver operating characteristic curve
MICM
Morphology, immunophenotype, cytogenetics, and molecular biology
To the Editor,
Acute myeloid leukemia (AML), a clonal disorder of hematopoietic progenitor cells, is one of the most common and fatal myeloid malignancies of elderly individuals [1]. Patients with AML who are over the age of 60 exhibit worse survival outcomes than younger patients with AML [2, 3]. The early detection of AML is thus integral to providing optimal clinical therapy. Although WHO guidelines are used internationally, the morphological assessment of leukocytes from bone marrow smears in accordance with the FAB classification system is still the first step in the diagnosis of AML (Additional file 2: Fig. S1A) [4, 5]. However, the classification of cell morphology is tedious and time-consuming, with considerable variation within and among different pathologists. Herein, we developed and validated an automated, fast, highly accurate, and universal AML diagnostic system that will help eliminate intra- and interobserver variance and facilitate the early diagnosis and treatment of AML [6, 7].
From 2010 to 2020, we collected bone marrow smears from 156 participants diagnosed with different subtypes of AML to serve as a developmental dataset. All patients were diagnosed by standard morphological categories of the FAB classification system and further validated by routine clinical phenotypes along with MICM procedures, including morphological diagnostics, immunophenotyping, cytogenetic features, and molecular genetics [8, 9]. To further assess the generalizability of our model, we conducted a test dataset comprising 495 participants and 1781 images from two independent centers between 2020 and 2021. The detailed methods are provided in Additional file 1, the representative images of the most unambiguous subtypes are shown in Additional file 2: Fig. S1B, and the clinical information of the participants is provided in Additional file 2: Table S1 and Fig. S2.
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Our proposed model AMLnet had two major components: a variable output number of deep convolutional network modules to process input images for diverse purposes and a voting module to transform from the image level to the patient level (Fig. 1a and Additional file 2: Fig. S3). For each individual, AMLnet can not only predict the subtype classification probability but also provide interpretable heatmaps to indicate which areas make the most significant contribution to the model's assessment for the pathologist to review.
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At the image level, the AMLnet achieved an average accuracy of above 0.9 for separating AML images from healthy controls on both the validation and test dataset (Fig. 1b). For discriminating different AML subtypes, we evaluated the performance of various mainstream deep-learning models on the test set (Fig. 1c) and identified EfficientNet as the most effective backbone for AMLnet. Our AMLnet demonstrated higher accuracy in certain subtypes, such as M2b, M3, M4Eo, M6, and M7 (Fig. 1d and Additional file 2: Table S2), and achieved an AUC of 0.885 on the test dataset (95% CI: 0.874–0.897; Fig. 1e and Additional file 2: Fig. S4A). When we set our AMLnet methods with looser parameters, the top-2 accuracy across nine subtypes increased to 0.73, and the top-3 accuracy increased to 0.82 at the image level (Fig. 1f and Additional file 2: Fig. S4C). At the patient level, we employed a majority voting strategy to the multiple images of each patient, achieving an AUC of 0.921 (95% CI: 0.915–0.927) and an accuracy of 0.67 at the patient level (Additional file 2: Fig. S4B). The top-2 accuracy increases to 0.82, and the top-3 accuracy increases to 0.89 (Fig. 1f). In clinical practice, pathologists comprehensively combine multiple images of the same patient to better diagnose the AML subtype and we investigated the relationship between the number of images for different patients and the accuracy at the patient level. We found that AMLnet's prediction performance for a patient increased with the number of images obtained for that patient (Fig. 1g), which indicated the potential application potential of the AMLnet model.
We then compared the performance between pathologists and AMLnet (Fig. 2a-c). At the level of all patients on the dual-center test dataset, our AMLnet exported all the predictions with 100% coverage, which was much higher than that of both the senior (56%) and junior (63.2%) pathologists. In addition, when comparing the patients selected for certain predictions by different pathologists, our AMLnet achieved comparable performance to the level of the senior pathologists, with an accuracy of 0.789, compared to 0.788 for senior pathologists and 0.634 for junior pathologists. These results demonstrate that the performance of AMLnet is comparable to that of senior pathologists and superior to that of junior pathologists, which could mitigate the image reading workload of pathologists.
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Finally, we employed integrated gradients to generate saliency maps to improve the interpretability of AMLnet and clarify its diagnostic mechanism [10, 11]. We presented representative examples of highlighted pixels inside leukemia cells in Fig. 2d and Additional file 2: Fig. S5. These internal structures in the images are important for the model's predictions, indicating that AMLnet learns from clinically relevant features instead of erythrocytes and background content. In addition, to enable better clinical application, we have built up a software that could facilitate pathologists to visualize the results of AMLnet and provided an interactive demo website (Additional file 3).
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In summary, we employed a dual-center approach and trained state-of-the-art AMLnet for the diagnosis and discrimination of diverse subtypes of AML. Our study showed that the deep-learning framework is effective in distinguishing different AML subtypes. Additionally, AMLnet performed better than junior human experts and was on par with senior human experts on the test dataset. In resource-limited countries and developing nations, this approach has the potential to serve as a rapid prescreening and decision support tool for cytomorphological pathologists, rather than a substitute for their role (the additional discussion is provided in Additional file 1).
Acknowledgements
Authors thank for the technical support by the Core Facilities, Zhejiang University School of Medicine. The cartoons in Fig. 1 were created with BioRender.com.
Declarations
Ethics approval and consent to participate
In our research, all patients were obtained retrospectively with consent in compliance with The First Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University and The Affiliated Hangzhou First People’s Hospital and comprehensively determined by routine cytomorphological diagnostics, immunophenotyping, and molecular genetics.
Consent for publication
Not applicable.
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
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