Abstract
Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is a deadly hematological malignancy. Cellular morphology detection of bone marrow smears based on the French–American–British (FAB) classification system remains an essential criterion in the diagnosis of hematological malignancies. However, the diagnosis and discrimination of distinct FAB subtypes of AML obtained from bone marrow smear images are tedious and time-consuming. In addition, there is considerable variation within and among pathologists, particularly in rural areas, where pathologists may not have relevant expertise. Here, we established a comprehensive database encompassing 8245 bone marrow smear images from 651 patients based on a retrospective dual-center study between 2010 and 2021 for the purpose of training and testing. Furthermore, we developed AMLnet, a deep-learning pipeline based on bone marrow smear images, that can discriminate not only between AML patients and healthy individuals but also accurately identify various AML subtypes. AMLnet achieved an AUC of 0.885 at the image level and 0.921 at the patient level in distinguishing nine AML subtypes on the test dataset. Furthermore, AMLnet outperformed junior human experts and was comparable to senior experts on the test dataset at the patient level. Finally, we provided an interactive demo website to visualize the saliency maps and the results of AMLnet for aiding pathologists’ diagnosis. Collectively, AMLnet has the potential to serve as a fast prescreening and decision support tool for cytomorphological pathologists, especially in areas where pathologists are overburdened by medical demands as well as in rural areas where medical resources are scarce.
Explore related subjects
Find the latest articles, discoveries, and news in related topics.To the Editor,
Acute myeloid leukemia (AML), a clonal disorder of hematopoietic progenitor cells, is one of the most common and fatal myeloid malignancies of elderly individuals [1]. Patients with AML who are over the age of 60 exhibit worse survival outcomes than younger patients with AML [2, 3]. The early detection of AML is thus integral to providing optimal clinical therapy. Although WHO guidelines are used internationally, the morphological assessment of leukocytes from bone marrow smears in accordance with the FAB classification system is still the first step in the diagnosis of AML (Additional file 2: Fig. S1A) [4, 5]. However, the classification of cell morphology is tedious and time-consuming, with considerable variation within and among different pathologists. Herein, we developed and validated an automated, fast, highly accurate, and universal AML diagnostic system that will help eliminate intra- and interobserver variance and facilitate the early diagnosis and treatment of AML [6, 7].
From 2010 to 2020, we collected bone marrow smears from 156 participants diagnosed with different subtypes of AML to serve as a developmental dataset. All patients were diagnosed by standard morphological categories of the FAB classification system and further validated by routine clinical phenotypes along with MICM procedures, including morphological diagnostics, immunophenotyping, cytogenetic features, and molecular genetics [8, 9]. To further assess the generalizability of our model, we conducted a test dataset comprising 495 participants and 1781 images from two independent centers between 2020 and 2021. The detailed methods are provided in Additional file 1, the representative images of the most unambiguous subtypes are shown in Additional file 2: Fig. S1B, and the clinical information of the participants is provided in Additional file 2: Table S1 and Fig. S2.
Our proposed model AMLnet had two major components: a variable output number of deep convolutional network modules to process input images for diverse purposes and a voting module to transform from the image level to the patient level (Fig. 1a and Additional file 2: Fig. S3). For each individual, AMLnet can not only predict the subtype classification probability but also provide interpretable heatmaps to indicate which areas make the most significant contribution to the model's assessment for the pathologist to review.
Analysis workflow and performance evaluation of AMLnet. a Bone marrow smears were first stained by Wright staining and digitized with an oil immersion microscope at ×100 magnification to images. The images were then labeled for training models. The trained models were used to analyze the patient’s images and applied to clinical practice. b The performance of our AMLnet for detecting the presence of AML on the validation set and test set. c Comparison of the current mainstream deep-learning neural networks in detecting different subtypes of AML in the test set, including EfficientNet-b4, RepVGG-b0, and ResNet18. d The confusion matrix of the AMLnet at the image level on the test set. e The ROC curve of the AMLnet at the image level and patient level on the test set. We used bootstrapping to estimate the confidence intervals of the AUC. f Top-1 to top-3 accuracy of the AMLnet at the image level and patient level based on majority votes across all subtypes of AML. g The accuracy curve of the diverse vote approaches at the patient level. As the number of images for each patient increases, the accuracy of our AMLnet increases
At the image level, the AMLnet achieved an average accuracy of above 0.9 for separating AML images from healthy controls on both the validation and test dataset (Fig. 1b). For discriminating different AML subtypes, we evaluated the performance of various mainstream deep-learning models on the test set (Fig. 1c) and identified EfficientNet as the most effective backbone for AMLnet. Our AMLnet demonstrated higher accuracy in certain subtypes, such as M2b, M3, M4Eo, M6, and M7 (Fig. 1d and Additional file 2: Table S2), and achieved an AUC of 0.885 on the test dataset (95% CI: 0.874–0.897; Fig. 1e and Additional file 2: Fig. S4A). When we set our AMLnet methods with looser parameters, the top-2 accuracy across nine subtypes increased to 0.73, and the top-3 accuracy increased to 0.82 at the image level (Fig. 1f and Additional file 2: Fig. S4C). At the patient level, we employed a majority voting strategy to the multiple images of each patient, achieving an AUC of 0.921 (95% CI: 0.915–0.927) and an accuracy of 0.67 at the patient level (Additional file 2: Fig. S4B). The top-2 accuracy increases to 0.82, and the top-3 accuracy increases to 0.89 (Fig. 1f). In clinical practice, pathologists comprehensively combine multiple images of the same patient to better diagnose the AML subtype and we investigated the relationship between the number of images for different patients and the accuracy at the patient level. We found that AMLnet's prediction performance for a patient increased with the number of images obtained for that patient (Fig. 1g), which indicated the potential application potential of the AMLnet model.
We then compared the performance between pathologists and AMLnet (Fig. 2a-c). At the level of all patients on the dual-center test dataset, our AMLnet exported all the predictions with 100% coverage, which was much higher than that of both the senior (56%) and junior (63.2%) pathologists. In addition, when comparing the patients selected for certain predictions by different pathologists, our AMLnet achieved comparable performance to the level of the senior pathologists, with an accuracy of 0.789, compared to 0.788 for senior pathologists and 0.634 for junior pathologists. These results demonstrate that the performance of AMLnet is comparable to that of senior pathologists and superior to that of junior pathologists, which could mitigate the image reading workload of pathologists.
Performance of the AMLnet compared with junior and senior pathologists and gradient visualizations of the AMLnet using the integrated gradient algorithm. a Workflow of the AMLnet versus pathologists’ performance study. b, c The chart on the left indicates the mean coverage of the prediction results for all the patients we provided, and the chart on the right is the comparison between pathologists and AMLnet only with different patients selected for certain predictions by the different pathologists. d Saliency maps are used to illustrate the gradient of a pixel with respect to the AMLnet’s loss function. Brighter pixels have a greater influence on AMLnet’s classification decision. The scale bar from blue to red indicates the increased contribution of the location to the model's classification choice. These maps suggest that the network learns to focus on the leukocyte and maps out its internal structures while giving less weight to background content. The columns are (1) the original image, (2) a saliency map, and (3) a saliency map overlaying the original image. Rather than equally weighting all AML-related cells, our AMLnet discriminates against them. The saliency maps for M4Eo indicate that our AMLnet only considered myelomonocytic with eosinophils as an essential foundation for assessment when predicting M4Eo compared to other granulocytes, and the maps for M7 indicate that only megakaryocytes were considered
Finally, we employed integrated gradients to generate saliency maps to improve the interpretability of AMLnet and clarify its diagnostic mechanism [10, 11]. We presented representative examples of highlighted pixels inside leukemia cells in Fig. 2d and Additional file 2: Fig. S5. These internal structures in the images are important for the model's predictions, indicating that AMLnet learns from clinically relevant features instead of erythrocytes and background content. In addition, to enable better clinical application, we have built up a software that could facilitate pathologists to visualize the results of AMLnet and provided an interactive demo website (Additional file 3).
In summary, we employed a dual-center approach and trained state-of-the-art AMLnet for the diagnosis and discrimination of diverse subtypes of AML. Our study showed that the deep-learning framework is effective in distinguishing different AML subtypes. Additionally, AMLnet performed better than junior human experts and was on par with senior human experts on the test dataset. In resource-limited countries and developing nations, this approach has the potential to serve as a rapid prescreening and decision support tool for cytomorphological pathologists, rather than a substitute for their role (the additional discussion is provided in Additional file 1).
Availability of data and materials
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/bigbins/AMLNet-model.
Change history
01 August 2024
This article has been retracted. Please see the Retraction Notice for more detail: https://doi.org/10.1186/s13045-024-01582-1
Abbreviations
- AML:
-
Acute myeloid leukemia
- FAB:
-
French–American–British
- AUC:
-
Area under the receiver operating characteristic curve
- MICM:
-
Morphology, immunophenotype, cytogenetics, and molecular biology
References
Döhner H, Weisdorf DJ, Bloomfield CD. Acute myeloid leukemia. N Engl J Med. 2015;373(12):1136–52.
Shallis RM, Wang R, Davidoff A, Ma X, Zeidan AM. Epidemiology of acute myeloid leukemia: Recent progress and enduring challenges. Blood Rev. 2019;36:70–87.
Juliusson G, Lazarevic V, Horstedt AS, Hagberg O, Hoglund M, Swedish Acute Leukemia Registry G. Acute myeloid leukemia in the real world: why population-based registries are needed. Blood. 2012;119(17):3890–9.
Riley RS, Hogan TF, Pavot DR, Forysthe R, Massey D, Smith E, et al. A pathologist’s perspective on bone marrow aspiration and biopsy: I Performing a bone marrow examination. J Clin Lab Anal. 2004;18(2):70–90.
Swerdlow SH, Campo E, Harris NL, Jaffe ES, Pileri SA, Stein H, et al. WHO classification of tumours of haematopoietic and lymphoid tissues, vol. 2. International agency for research on cancer Lyon, 2008.
Kan A. Machine learning applications in cell image analysis. Immunol Cell Biol. 2017;95(6):525–30.
Radakovich N, Nagy M, Nazha A. Machine learning in haematological malignancies. The Lancet Haematology. 2020;7(7):e541–50.
Ma Y, Tong HX, Deng X, Zhao Y, Liu ZG, Zhang JH. MICM characteristics and typing diagnosis in acute myelogenous leukemia patients (AML-M2) with complex karyotype t (2;21;8)(p12;q22;q22). Zhongguo Shi Yan Xue Ye Xue Za Zhi. 2009;17(1):12–6.
Bennett JM, Catovsky D, Daniel MT, Flandrin G, Galton DAG, Gralnick HR, et al. Proposed revised criteria for the classification of acute Myeloid-Leukemia—a report of the French-American-British Cooperative Group. Ann Intern Med. 1985;103(4):620–5.
Selvaraju RR, Cogswell M, Das A, Vedantam R, Parikh D, Batra D. Grad-cam: Visual explanations from deep networks via gradient-based localization. Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on computer vision. 2017;2017:618–26.
Chattopadhay A, Sarkar A, Howlader P, Balasubramanian VN. Grad-cam++: Generalized gradient-based visual explanations for deep convolutional networks. 2018 IEEE winter conference on applications of computer vision (WACV); 2018: IEEE; 2018. p. 839–847.
Acknowledgements
Authors thank for the technical support by the Core Facilities, Zhejiang University School of Medicine. The cartoons in Fig. 1 were created with BioRender.com.
Funding
This work was supported by grants from the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2022YFA1103500), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (82222003, 92268117, 82161138028), the Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (LR19H080001), and the Zhejiang Innovation Team Grant (2020R01006).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
QPX conceived the project; LJH, YZB, ZM, GXL, SD, ZT, ZSQ, ZYJ, TJX, YSC digitized samples and prepared the dataset for usage; LJH verified the image database and clinically assessed its outputs; YZB and WX trained and evaluated the network system; YZB interpreted the results and prepared the manuscript and analyzed the results; QPX and HH reviewed and edited the manuscript. All authors contributed to reading and editing the manuscript.
Corresponding authors
Ethics declarations
Ethics approval and consent to participate
In our research, all patients were obtained retrospectively with consent in compliance with The First Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University and The Affiliated Hangzhou First People’s Hospital and comprehensively determined by routine cytomorphological diagnostics, immunophenotyping, and molecular genetics.
Consent for publication
Not applicable.
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
This article has been retracted. Please see the retraction notice for more detail: https://doi.org/10.1186/s13045-024-01582-1
Supplementary Information
Additional file 1
. Additional methods and additional discussion
Additional file 2
. Figure S1. Bone marrow smear diagram and representative images of AML subtypes; Figure S2. Distribution of dual-center test dataset in the study; Figure S3. AMLnet diagnostic pipeline; Figure S4. Performance of the AMLnet on image and patient level in the test set; Figure S5. Visualization of AMLnet Gradients in Discriminating AML Subtypes M1, M2a, M2b, and M4; Table S1. Characteristics of patients in the developmental and dual-center test datasets; Table S2. Subtype-wise performance of AMLnet at the image level on the test set
Additional file 3. A video demo of how to utilize our software to visualize the results of AMLnet
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
About this article
Cite this article
Yu, Z., Li, J., Wen, X. et al. RETRACTED ARTICLE: AMLnet, A deep-learning pipeline for the differential diagnosis of acute myeloid leukemia from bone marrow smears. J Hematol Oncol 16, 27 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13045-023-01419-3
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s13045-023-01419-3