DeepLIIF: Deep Learning-Inferred Multiplex ImmunoFluorescence for IHC Quantification

Reporting biomarkers assessed by routine immunohistochemical (IHC) staining of tissue is broadly used in diagnostic pathology laboratories for patient care. To date, clinical reporting is predominantly qualitative or semi-quantitative. By creating a multitask deep learning framework referred to as DeepLIIF, we are presenting a single step solution to nuclear segmentation and quantitative single-cell IHC scoring. Leveraging a unique de novo dataset of co-registered IHC and multiplex immunoflourescence (mpIF) data generated from the same tissue section, we simultaneously segment and translate low-cost and prevalent IHC slides to more expensive-yet-informative mpIF images. Moreover, a nuclear-pore marker, LAP2beta, is co-registered to improve cell segmentation and protein expression quantification on IHC slides. By formulating the IHC quantification as cell instance segmentation/classification rather than cell detection problem, we show that our model trained on clean IHC Ki67 data can generalize to more noisy and artifact-ridden images as well as other nuclear and non-nuclear markers such as CD3, CD8, BCL2, BCL6, MYC, MUM1, CD10 and TP53. We thoroughly evaluate our method on publicly available bench-mark datasets as well as against pathologists semi-quantitative scoring. The code, trained models, and the resultant embeddings for all the datasets used in this paper will be released via GitHub.