GRAPHITE: Graph-Based Interpretable Tissue Examination for Enhanced Explainability in Breast Cancer Histopathology

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Hauptverfasser: Mondol, Raktim Kumar, Millar, Ewan K. A., Graham, Peter H., Browne, Lois, Sowmya, Arcot, Meijering, Erik
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Mondol, Raktim Kumar
Millar, Ewan K. A.
Graham, Peter H.
Browne, Lois
Sowmya, Arcot
Meijering, Erik
author_facet Mondol, Raktim Kumar
Millar, Ewan K. A.
Graham, Peter H.
Browne, Lois
Sowmya, Arcot
Meijering, Erik
contents Explainable AI (XAI) in medical histopathology is essential for enhancing the interpretability and clinical trustworthiness of deep learning models in cancer diagnosis. However, the black-box nature of these models often limits their clinical adoption. We introduce GRAPHITE (Graph-based Interpretable Tissue Examination), a post-hoc explainable framework designed for breast cancer tissue microarray (TMA) analysis. GRAPHITE employs a multiscale approach, extracting patches at various magnification levels, constructing an hierarchical graph, and utilising graph attention networks (GAT) with scalewise attention (SAN) to capture scale-dependent features. We trained the model on 140 tumour TMA cores and four benign whole slide images from which 140 benign samples were created, and tested it on 53 pathologist-annotated TMA samples. GRAPHITE outperformed traditional XAI methods, achieving a mean average precision (mAP) of 0.56, an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) of 0.94, and a threshold robustness (ThR) of 0.70, indicating that the model maintains high performance across a wide range of thresholds. In clinical utility, GRAPHITE achieved the highest area under the decision curve (AUDC) of 4.17e+5, indicating reliable decision support across thresholds. These results highlight GRAPHITE's potential as a clinically valuable tool in computational pathology, providing interpretable visualisations that align with the pathologists' diagnostic reasoning and support precision medicine.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_04206
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle GRAPHITE: Graph-Based Interpretable Tissue Examination for Enhanced Explainability in Breast Cancer Histopathology
Mondol, Raktim Kumar
Millar, Ewan K. A.
Graham, Peter H.
Browne, Lois
Sowmya, Arcot
Meijering, Erik
Image and Video Processing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Explainable AI (XAI) in medical histopathology is essential for enhancing the interpretability and clinical trustworthiness of deep learning models in cancer diagnosis. However, the black-box nature of these models often limits their clinical adoption. We introduce GRAPHITE (Graph-based Interpretable Tissue Examination), a post-hoc explainable framework designed for breast cancer tissue microarray (TMA) analysis. GRAPHITE employs a multiscale approach, extracting patches at various magnification levels, constructing an hierarchical graph, and utilising graph attention networks (GAT) with scalewise attention (SAN) to capture scale-dependent features. We trained the model on 140 tumour TMA cores and four benign whole slide images from which 140 benign samples were created, and tested it on 53 pathologist-annotated TMA samples. GRAPHITE outperformed traditional XAI methods, achieving a mean average precision (mAP) of 0.56, an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) of 0.94, and a threshold robustness (ThR) of 0.70, indicating that the model maintains high performance across a wide range of thresholds. In clinical utility, GRAPHITE achieved the highest area under the decision curve (AUDC) of 4.17e+5, indicating reliable decision support across thresholds. These results highlight GRAPHITE's potential as a clinically valuable tool in computational pathology, providing interpretable visualisations that align with the pathologists' diagnostic reasoning and support precision medicine.
title GRAPHITE: Graph-Based Interpretable Tissue Examination for Enhanced Explainability in Breast Cancer Histopathology
topic Image and Video Processing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.04206