AI-based pre-screening of <i>BRCA1/2</i> mutation likelihood from routine H&amp;E histopathology in unselected breast cancer cases using peakPredictBRCA.

546 Background: BRCA1/2 mutation status is essential for precision oncology in breast cancer, directly guiding therapy decisions such as eligibility for PARP inhibitors. However, not all patients globally have reimbursed access to genetic BRCA testing, due to cost and a lack of uniform global implementation, leading to actionable mutations being missed. We developed a scalable artificial intelligence pre-screening algorithm that estimates BRCA1/2 mutation likelihood from routine whole-slide H&amp;E images, to enable systematic prioritization of patients for genetic testing. Methods: peakPredictBRCA, a deep learning-based algorithm, was developed to predict likelihood of BRCA1/2 mutations from H&amp;E whole-slide images of primary and metastatic breast cancer cases, independent of hormone receptor or HER2 status. Breast cancer images were collected from 6 institutions across 5 countries using different whole-slide scanners (Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Jordan, and USA), with slide-level BRCA mutation labels derived from clinical sequencing (n=725 images, 60% mutated). Training data was augmented with open-access TCGA datasets for breast, prostate, and ovarian cancer (n = 1,633 images), resulting in 2,358 total images (21% mutated). Model performance was evaluated on the collected breast cancer images using five-fold cross-validation. The model was trained end-to-end without manual annotations using multiple-instance learning. Results: On the breast cancer cohort, peakPredictBRCA achieved a mean AUC of 0.81±0.13. At a screening-oriented operating point, the model identified most BRCA1/2 mutated cases (mean sensitivity 0.82±0.23) while excluding a substantial proportion of non-mutated cases (mean specificity 0.56±0.38), without additional calibration on held-out images. Additional analyses during development demonstrated that robust generalization to unseen data depends on appropriate tumor tissue detection and model architecture selection. Conclusions: Our results demonstrate that BRCA1/2 mutation likelihood can be effectively triaged from routine H&amp;E breast cancer histology with consistent performance across institutions, scanners, and slide preparations. Implementation of the peakPredictBRCA algorithm in routine pathology workflows could enable systematic prescreening of unselected breast cancer cases at diagnosis and prioritization for confirmatory genetic testing, particularly in resource-constrained settings. Ongoing work focuses on incorporating human-interpretable features and on prospective validation in real-world workflows.

Authors

Institutions

Publication Details

Journal
Journal of Clinical Oncology
Published
2026-05-27
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1200/jco.2026.44.16_suppl.546
Primary Topic
AI in cancer detection
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00
Controls
|||
ALL TIME
JAN
FEB
MAR
APR
MAY
JUN
JUL
AUG
SEP
OCT
article

AI-based pre-screening of BRCA1/2 mutation likelihood from routine H&E histopathology in unselected breast cancer cases using peakPredictBRCA.

Rashi Pant, André Kochanke, Prasanna Channathodiyil, Maria Holm et al.
Journal of Clinical Oncology
AI in cancer detection
article

AI-based pre-screening of BRCA1/2 mutation likelihood from routine H&E histopathology in unselected breast cancer cases using peakPredictBRCA.

Rashi Pant, André Kochanke, Prasanna Channathodiyil, Maria Holm, Patrick Frey, Rafik Ibrahim, Tobias Lang, Martin Mondino, Leonard Silva, Petra Preus, Sandra Sarancone, Sarah Dunlap, Jasmine Joo Yeon Lee, Maher Sughayer
article en

Abstract

546 Background: BRCA1/2 mutation status is essential for precision oncology in breast cancer, directly guiding therapy decisions such as eligibility for PARP inhibitors. However, not all patients globally have reimbursed access to genetic BRCA testing, due to cost and a lack of uniform global implementation, leading to actionable mutations being missed. We developed a scalable artificial intelligence pre-screening algorithm that estimates BRCA1/2 mutation likelihood from routine whole-slide H&amp;E images, to enable systematic prioritization of patients for genetic testing. Methods: peakPredictBRCA, a deep learning-based algorithm, was developed to predict likelihood of BRCA1/2 mutations from H&amp;E whole-slide images of primary and metastatic breast cancer cases, independent of hormone receptor or HER2 status. Breast cancer images were collected from 6 institutions across 5 countries using different whole-slide scanners (Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Jordan, and USA), with slide-level BRCA mutation labels derived from clinical sequencing (n=725 images, 60% mutated). Training data was augmented with open-access TCGA datasets for breast, prostate, and ovarian cancer (n = 1,633 images), resulting in 2,358 total images (21% mutated). Model performance was evaluated on the collected breast cancer images using five-fold cross-validation. The model was trained end-to-end without manual annotations using multiple-instance learning. Results: On the breast cancer cohort, peakPredictBRCA achieved a mean AUC of 0.81±0.13. At a screening-oriented operating point, the model identified most BRCA1/2 mutated cases (mean sensitivity 0.82±0.23) while excluding a substantial proportion of non-mutated cases (mean specificity 0.56±0.38), without additional calibration on held-out images. Additional analyses during development demonstrated that robust generalization to unseen data depends on appropriate tumor tissue detection and model architecture selection. Conclusions: Our results demonstrate that BRCA1/2 mutation likelihood can be effectively triaged from routine H&amp;E breast cancer histology with consistent performance across institutions, scanners, and slide preparations. Implementation of the peakPredictBRCA algorithm in routine pathology workflows could enable systematic prescreening of unselected breast cancer cases at diagnosis and prioritization for confirmatory genetic testing, particularly in resource-constrained settings. Ongoing work focuses on incorporating human-interpretable features and on prospective validation in real-world workflows.

Journal of Clinical OncologyVol. 44(16_suppl)
King Hussein Cancer Center (JO), National University of Rosario (AR), AstraZeneca (France) (FR), AstraZeneca (Netherlands) (NL), AstraZeneca (Singapore) (SG), AstraZeneca (Poland) (PL), Sociedade Brasileira de Oncologia Clínica (BR), Dubai Medical College (AE)
Partnerships for the goals
Openalex Percentile: Top 4%
AI in cancer detection
AI Navigator

Ask Laika to Summarize, Analyze, and Connect papers live on the map.

Summarize Papers & Methodologies

Extract key findings, datasets, and comparative methods across publications.

Benchmark Rankings & Visual Analytics

Rank top research institutions, authors, funders, topics, and journals by Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) and paper volume with instant charts.

Connect Distant Disciplines

Bridge topological clusters on the map to find hidden collaborative intersections.