Children’s Cancer Therapy Development Institute CCTDI understood that correctly diagnosing a rare childhood cancer such as sarcoma, can be critical to assigning the correct treatment regimen. With a finite number of pathologists worldwide specializing in pediatric/young adult sarcoma histopathology, access to expert differential diagnosis early in case assessment is limited for many global regions. CCTDI used dātma.BASE to develop and support a deep-learning convolutional neural network (CNN)-based differential diagnosis system to act as a pre-pathologist screening tool that quantifies diagnosis likelihood amongst trained soft-tissue sarcoma subtypes based on whole histopathology tissue slides.

The CNN model is trained on a cohort of 424 centrally reviewed histopathology tissue slides of alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma, embryonal rhabdomyosarcoma, and clear-cell sarcoma tumors, all initially diagnosed at the originating institution and subsequently validated by central review.

The dātma.BASE and the CNN model were able to accurately classify the withheld testing cohort with resulting receiver operating characteristic (ROC) area under curve (AUC) values above 0.889 for all tested sarcoma subtypes. The positive result demonstrated the potential of machine learning to assist local pathologists in quickly narrowing the differential diagnosis of sarcoma subtype in children, adolescents, and young adults.