Classification des tumeurs intrahépatiques par méthode faiblement supervisée à partir de biopsies de routine

Underway

01/04/2022

31/03/2027

Primary liver cancers are the 4th leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide, with increasing incidence in most Western countries. They represent a heterogeneous group of tumors associated with distinct risk factors, clinical findings and imaging, histological and molecular features. Among these tumors, hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma (iCCA) are by far the most common, representing the two extremes of the tumor spectrum. In between, combined hepato-cholangiocarcinoma (cCHC-CCA) is recognized as a rare tumor sharing features of both HCC and iCCA, whose prognosis remains unclear. While imaging and tumor biopsy separately achieve good results for the accurate diagnosis of HCC and iCCA, the diagnostic performance of cCHC-CCA based on a single modality is poor. Histological analysis represents the gold standard for the diagnosis of cHCC-CCA, but even from a histological point of view, this diagnosis can be very difficult, particularly in biopsy samples. Recently, we have shown that the combination of imaging and tumor biopsy can improve the diagnosis of cHCC-CCA, underlining the value of using multiscale imaging data.

The methodological approach is based on recent developments in artificial intelligence concerning weakly supervised learning from features extracted by pre-trained deep neural networks. In addition, one of the main novelties of the proposed study will be the development of a new approach to multi-scale data mining to take advantage of the two types of images available (CT-scan and histology).