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Lymphovascular Invasion Detection in Breast Cancer Using Deep Learning

Keshvarikhojasteh, H.; Stathonikos, N.; Pham, P.; van Diest, P. J.; Vreuls, C.; Bertram, C. A.; Pluim, J. P. W.; Veta, M.

2025-06-11 pathology
10.1101/2025.06.07.25329195 medRxiv
Show abstract

Lymphovascular invasion (LVI) is a critical pathological feature in breast cancer, strongly associated with an increased risk of metastasis and poorer prognosis. However, manual detection of LVI is labor-intensive and prone to inter-observer variability. To address these challenges, this study explores the potential of Swin-Transformer, a state-of-the-art deep learning model, and GigaPath, a cutting-edge foundation model, for automating the detection of LVI in whole-slide images (WSIs) of breast cancer tissue. We trained the models on a dataset of 90 annotated Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E)-stained breast cancer slides, achieving strong performance with a slide-level Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic (AUC) of 97%, a sensitivity of 79% with an average of 8 false positives (FPs) per slide using the best-performing model. The results underscore the potential of Swin-Transformer and GigaPath to enhance diagnostic accuracy and consistency in LVI detection.

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