Abstract
Digital image analysis is quickly transforming pathology into a quantitative discipline, where numerous cellular features from individual cells in a tissue samples can be measured and analyzed. Furthermore, digital image analysis is bringing immunohistochemical methods to the forefront of biomarker research making them an integral part of drug development and personalized medicine. As hundreds of quantitative measures generated by digital image analysis of tissues can be correlated to clinical outcomes, the need grows for statistical methods to evaluate these quantitative approaches. Cutpoint analysis is one such statistical method often requested for analyzing data from tissue biopsy evaluation in drug development. This frequently is driven by the need to analyze biomarker expression data in relation to patient survival to stratify patients into subsets of responders and nonresponders to a particular drug treatment. In this chapter we discuss data and outcome-driven approaches in cutpoint analysis, and the caution that should be observed in using cutpoint analysis and appropriate methods for avoiding type I errors. Finally, we provide two examples of how cutpoint analysis can be applied in pharmaceutical datasets.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Mazumdar M, Glassman J (2000) Categorizing a prognostic variable: review of methods, code for easy implementation and applications to decision-making about cancer treatments. Stat Med 113–132
Contal C, O'Quigley J (1999) An application of changepoint methods in studying the effect of age on survival in breast cancer. Comput Stat Data Anal 30:253–270
Faraggi D, Simon R (1996) A simulation study of cross-validation for selecting an optimal cutpoint in univariate survival analysis. Stat Med 15:2203–2213
Mazumdar M, Smith A, Bacik J (2003) Methods for categorizing a prognostic variable in a multivariable setting. Stat Med 22:559–571
Altman D, Lausen B, Sauerbrei W, Schumacher M (1994) Dangers of using “optimal” cutpoints in the evaluation of prognostic factors. J Natl Cancer Inst 86:829–835
Cumsille F, Bangdiwala S, Sen PK, Kupper L (2000) Effect of dichotomizinlg a continuous variable on the model structure in multiple linear regression models. Commun Stat 29:643–654
Liquet B, Commenges D (2001) Correction of the p-value after multiple coding of an explanatory variable in logistic regression. Stat Med 20:2815–2826
Boucher K, Slattery M, Berry T, Quesenberry C, Anderson K (1998) A comparison of statistical methods to analyze dose–response and trend analysis in epidemiologic studies. Stat Meth Epidemiol 51:1223–1233
MacCallum R, Zhang S, Preacher K, Rucker D (2002) On the practice of dichotomization of quantitative variables. Psychol Methods 7:19–40
Williams B, Mandrekar J, Cha S, Furth A (2006) Finding optimal cutpoints for continuous covariates with binary and time-to-event outcomes. Technical report. May Clinic, Rochester, MN
Schulgen G, Lausen B, Olsen J, Schumacher M (1994) Outcome-oriented cutpoints in analysis of quantitative exposures. Am J Epidemiol 140:172–184
Greenland S (1995) Avoiding power loss associated with categorization and ordinal scores in dose-response and trend analysis. Epidemiology 6:450–454
Therneau T, Grambsch P, Fleming T (1990) Martingale-based residuals for survival models. Biometrika 77:147–160
Royston P, Altman D, Sauerbrei W (2006) Dichotomizing continuous predictors in multiple regression: a bad idea. Stat Med 25:127–141
Altman D, Royston P (2006) The cost of dichotomising continuous variables. BMJ 332:1080
Hilsenbeck S, Clark G, McGuire W (1992) Why do so many prognostic factors fail to pan out? Breast Cancer Res Treat 22:197–206
Ragland D (1992) Dichotomizing continuous outcome variables: dependence of the magnitude of association and statistical power on the cutpoint. Epidemiology 3:434–440
Hollander N, Sauerbrei W, Schmacher M (2004) Confidence intervals for the effect of a prognostic factor after selection of an `optimal' cutpoint. Stat Med 23:1701–1713
Coombes K, Morris J, Hu J, Edmonson S, Baggerly K (2005) Serum proteomics profiling – a young technology begins to mature. Nat Biotechnol 23:291–292
Braggerly K, Morris J, Coombes K (2004) Reproducibility of SELDI-TOF protein patterns in serum: comparing datasets from different experiments. Bioinformatics 20:777–785
Potti A, Dressman H, Bild A, Reidel R, Chan G, Sayer R, Cragun J, Cottrill H, Kelley M, Peterson R, Harpole D, Marks J, Berchuck A, Ginsburg G, Febbo P, Lancaster J, Nevins J (2011) Retraction: genomic signatures to guide the use of chemotherapeutics. Nat Med 17:135
Matos LL, Trufelli DC, de Matos MG, da Silva Pinhal MA (2010) Immunohistochemistry as an important tool in biomarkers detection and clinical practice. Biomark Insights 5:9–20
Bodey B (2002) The significance of immunohistochemistry in the diagnosis and therapy of neoplasms. Expert Opin Biol Ther 2(4):371–393
Alymani NA, Smith MD, Williams DJ, Petty RD (2010) Predictive biomarkers for personalised anti-cancer drug use: discovery to clinical implementation. Eur J Cancer 46(5):869–879
Jalava P, Kuopio T, Huovinen R, Laine J, Collan Y (2005) Immunohistochemical staining of estrogen and progesterone receptors: aspects for evaluating positivity and defining the cutpoints. Anticancer Res 25:2535–2542
Zlobec I, Steele R, Terracciano L, Jass JR, Lugli A (2007) Selecting immunohistochemical cut-off scores for novel biomarkers of progression and survival in colorectal cancer. J Clin Pathol 60(10):1112–1116
Mascaux C, Wynes MW, Kato Y, Tran C, Asuncion BR, Zhao JM, Gustavson M, Ranger-Moore J, Gaire F, Matsubayashi J, Nagao T, Yoshida K, Ohira T, Ikeda N, Hirsch FR (2011) EGFR protein expression in non-small cell lung cancer predicts response to an EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitor – a novel antibody for immunohistochemistry or AQUA technology. Clin Cancer Res 17(24):7796–7807
Salles G, de Jong D, Xie W, Rosenwald A, Chhanabhai M, Gaulard P, Klapper W, Calaminici M, Sander B, Thorns C, Campo E, Molina T, Lee A, Pfreundschuh M, Horning S, Lister A, Sehn LH, Raemaekers J, Hagenbeek A, Gascoyne RD, Weller E (2011) Prognostic significance of immunohistochemical biomarkers in diffuse large B-cell lymphoma: a study from the Lunenburge Lymphoma Biomarker Consortium. Blood 117(26):7070–7078
Miller R, Siegmund D (1982) Maximally selected chi square statistics. Biometrics 38:1011–1016
Hilsenbeck S, Clark G (1996) Practical p-value adjustment for optimally selected cutpoints. Stat Med 15:103–112
Lausen B, Schumacher M (1996) Evaluating the effect of optimized cutoff values in the assessment of prognostic factors. Comput Stat Data Anal 21:307–326
Harrell F (2001) Regression modelling strategies with applications to linear models, logistic regression, and survival analysis. Springer, New York
Magder L, Fix A (2003) Optimal choice of a cut point for a quantitative diagnostic test performed for research purposes. J Clin Epidemiol 56:956–962
Galon J, Costes A, Sanchez-Cabo F, Kirilovsky A, Mlecnik B, Lagorce-Pagé C, Tosolini M, Camus M, Berger A, Wind P, Zinzindohoué F, Bruneval P, Cugnenc P, Trajanoski Z, Fridman W, Pagés F (2006) Type, density, and location of immune cells within human colorectal tumors predict clinical outcome. Science 313:1960–1964
Lee HE, Chae S, Lee Y, Kim M, Lee HS, Lee B, Kim W (2008) Prognostic implications of type and density of tumour-infiltrating lymphocytes in gastric cancer. Br J Cancer 99:1704–1711
Fukuda K, Tsujitani S, Maeta Y, Yamaguchi K, Ikeguchi M, Kaibara N (2002) The expression of RCAS1 and tumor infiltrating lymphocytes in patients with T3 gastric carcinoma. Gastric Cancer 5:220–227
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York
About this protocol
Cite this protocol
Black, J.C., Suraneni, M.V., Potts, S.J. (2014). Cutpoint Methods in Digital Pathology and Companion Diagnostics. In: Potts, S., Eberhard, D., Wharton, Jr., K. (eds) Molecular Histopathology and Tissue Biomarkers in Drug and Diagnostic Development. Methods in Pharmacology and Toxicology. Humana Press, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/7653_2014_34
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/7653_2014_34
Published:
Publisher Name: Humana Press, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4939-2680-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-4939-2681-7
eBook Packages: Springer Protocols