Tae-Yeong Kwak | Searcharxiv

arXiv2025

Assessing the risk of recurrence in early-stage breast cancer through H&E stained whole slide images

Accurate prediction of the likelihood of recurrence is important in the selection of postoperative treatment for patients with early-stage breast cancer. In this study, we investigated whether deep learning algorithms can predict patients' risk of recurrence by analyzing the pathology images of their cancer histology.We analyzed 125 hematoxylin and eosin-stained whole slide images (WSIs) from 125 patients across two institutions (National Cancer Center and Korea University Medical Center Guro Hospital) to predict breast cancer recurrence risk using deep learning. Sensitivity reached 0.857, 0.746, and 0.529 for low, intermediate, and high-risk categories, respectively, with specificity of 0.816, 0.803, and 0.972, and a Pearson correlation of 0.61 with histological grade. Class activation maps highlighted features like tubule formation and mitotic rate, suggesting a cost-effective approach to risk stratification, pending broader validation. These findings suggest that deep learning models trained exclusively on hematoxylin and eosin stained whole slide images can approximate genomic assay results, offering a cost-effective and scalable tool for breast cancer recurrence risk assessment. However, further validation using larger and more balanced datasets is needed to confirm the clinical applicability of our approach.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2019

Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting by Neuron-level Plasticity Control

To address the issue of catastrophic forgetting in neural networks, we propose a novel, simple, and effective solution called neuron-level plasticity control (NPC). While learning a new task, the proposed method preserves the knowledge for the previous tasks by controlling the plasticity of the network at the neuron level. NPC estimates the importance value of each neuron and consolidates important \textit{neurons} by applying lower learning rates, rather than restricting individual connection weights to stay close to certain values. The experimental results on the incremental MNIST (iMNIST) and incremental CIFAR100 (iCIFAR100) datasets show that neuron-level consolidation is substantially more effective compared to the connection-level consolidation approaches.

cs.CV↗