francescociompi.com | 2025
IGNITE
- Project title: Predicting Lung Cancer Immunotherapy Response. It's personal.
- Funding: Personal VIDI Grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO)
- Duration: 2021-2026
- My role: Project Leader (personal grant)
Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is one of the deadliest subtypes of cancer. Recent breakthroughs in the development of immunotherapy have added a very impactful weapon to the arsenal of therapies to combat NSCLC, in some cases doubling the overall survival rate of late-stage NSCLC patients. However, only a fraction of patients responds to these drugs, as low as twenty percent, while the vast majority is exposed to drug toxicity without therapeutic effect.
The current therapy eligibility criteria for immunotherapy are based on visual histological assessment; this assessment is subject to all the limitations that a human reader brings to the table, including reader intervariability and incomplete analysis of the tissue on the slide. Moreover, we hypothesize that the current eligibility criteria fail to capture the whole biological picture, incorporating too few factors of a multi-faceted story.
In this project, we intend to develop deep learning algorithms that a) help reproduce the biomarkers needed for the eligibility criteria so that pathologists may do this analysis in a faster and more reproducible way; b) surpass the current criteria in accuracy of therapy-response prediction by extracting novel biomarkers and combining existing ones in an automated fashion.
PUBLICATIONS
- V. Eekelen, Leander, J. Spronck, M. Looijen-Salamon, S. Vos, E. Munari, I. Girolami, A. Eccher, B. Acs, C. Boyaci, G. de Souza, M. Demirel-Andishmand, L. Meesters, D. Zegers, L. van der Woude, W. Theelen, M. van den Heuvel, K. Grünberg, B. van Ginneken, J. van der Laak and F. Ciompi, "Comparing deep learning and pathologist quantification of cell-level PD-L1 expression in non-small cell lung cancer whole-slide images", Scientific Reports, 2024;14.
- M. van Rijthoven, S. Obahor, F. Pagliarulo, V. den Maries, P. Schraml, H. Moch, J. van der Laak, F. Ciompi and K. Silina, "Multi-resolution deep learning characterizes tertiary lymphoid structures and their prognostic relevance in solid tumors", Communications Medicine, 2024.
- C. Lems, D. Geijs, J. Bokhorst, M. Sülter, L. van Eekelen and F. Ciompi, "Color Deconvolution for Color-Agnostic and Cross-Modality Analysis of Immunohistochemistry Whole-Slide Images with Deep Learning", 2024 IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI), 2024:1-4.
- J. Spronck, T. Gelton, L. van Eekelen, J. Bogaerts, L. Tessier, M. van Rijthoven, L. van der Woude, M. van den Heuvel, W. Theelen, J. van der Laak and F. Ciompi, "nnUNet meets pathology: bridging the gap for application to whole-slide images and computational biomarkers", Medical Imaging with Deep Learning, 2023.
- J. Vermazeren, L. van Eekelen, L. Meesters, M. Looijen-Salamon, S. Vos, E. Munari, C. Mercan and F. Ciompi, "muPEN: Multi-class PseudoEdgeNet for PD-L1 assessment", Medical Imaging with Deep Learning, 2021.
- L. Eekelen, G. den Heuvel, L. Studer, J. Spronck, K. Grünberg, D. Zegers, J. der Laak, M. den Heuvel and F. Ciompi, "Immunotherapy response prediction for non-small cell lung cancer is improved by using cell-graphs of the tumor microenvironment", European Congress on Digital Pathology, 2024.
- J. Spronck, L. Eekelen, L. Tessier, J. Bogaerts, L. van der Woude, M. van den Heuvel, W. Theelen and F. Ciompi, "Deep learning-based quantification of immune infiltrate for predicting response to pembrolizumab from pre-treatment biopsies of metastatic non-small cell lung cancer: A study on the PEMBRO-RT phase II trial", Immuno-Oncology and Technology, 2022.
- L. van Eekelen, E. Munari, I. Girolami, A. Eccher, J. van der Laak, K. Grunberg, M. Looijen-Salamon, S. Vos and F. Ciompi, "Inter-rater agreement of pathologists on determining PD-L1 status in non-small cell lung cancer", European Congress of Pathology, 2022.
- E. van Genugten, B. Piet, G. Schreibelt, T. van Oorschot, G. van den Heuvel, F. Ciompi, C. Jacobs, J. de Vries, M. van den Heuvel and E. Aarntzen, "Imaging tumor-infiltrating CD8 (+) T-cells in non-small cell lung cancer patients upon neo-adjuvant treatment with durvalumab", European Molecular Imaging Meeting, 2022.
- L. van Eekelen, E. Munari, L. Meesters, G. de Souza, M. Demirel-Andishmand, D. Zegers, M. Looijen-Salamon, S. Vos and F. Ciompi, "Nuclei detection with YOLOv5 in PD-L1 stained non-small cell lung cancer whole slide images", European Congress of Pathology, 2022.