Deep Learning Model for Predicting Lung Adenocarcinoma Recurrence from Whole Slide Images

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related death in the United States. Lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) is one of the most common subtypes of lung cancer that can be treated with resection. While resection can be curative, there is a significant risk of recurrence, which necessitates close monitoring and additional treatment planning. Traditionally, microscopic evaluation of tumor grading in resected specimens is a standard pathologic practice that informs subsequent therapy and patient management. However, this approach is labor-intensive and subject to inter-observer variability. To address the challenge of accurately predicting recurrence, we propose a deep learning-based model to predict the 5-year recurrence of LUAD in patients following surgical resection. In our model, we introduce an innovative dual-attention architecture that significantly enhances computational efficiency. Our model demonstrates excellent performance in recurrent risk stratification, achieving a hazard ratio of 2.29 (95% CI: 1.69-3.09, <i>p</i> < 0.005), which outperforms several existing deep learning methods. This study contributes to ongoing efforts to use deep learning models for automatically learning histologic patterns from whole slide images (WSIs) and predicting LUAD recurrence risk, thereby improving the accuracy and efficiency of treatment decision making.