HistoCell algorithm framework (a) and its prediction accuracy for cell type
information related to tumor pathological imaging (b)
With the support of the National Natural Science Foundation of China
project (Approval No. T2341008) and other grants, Professor Li Shao's research
group from the Beijing Institute of Traditional Chinese Medicine at Tsinghua
University has made research progress in intelligent analysis of microscopic
information in pathological images of both Chinese and Western medicine,
promoting precise prevention and treatment of tumors. The research results,
titled "Systematic inference of super-resolution cell spatial profiles from
history images", were published online on February 21, 2025 in the journal
Nature Communications. The paper link is:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-57072-6 .
Decoding the correlation between pathological imaging features and clinical
macroscopic phenotype, microscopic cellular information through artificial
intelligence algorithms, and revealing the diagnosis and treatment rules of
complex diseases such as tumors in traditional Chinese and Western medicine, is
currently a research hotspot in the field of medical imaging. This study
proposes a new algorithm for inferring the relationship between pathological
images and cell networks based on a weakly supervised learning framework -
HistoCell. This algorithm comprehensively characterizes the pathological
morphological features and spatial topological features, combined with the
hierarchical encoding rules embedded at the cellular level, to achieve spatial
correlation network recognition of pathological microscopic information at the
single-cell scale, expanding the scope of analysis of pathological imaging
related microscopic information. The research team applied the HistoCell
algorithm to early warning of gastric cancer, prognostic risk analysis of breast
cancer and other cancer chemotherapy drug response prediction and other clinical
diagnosis and treatment scenarios, and verified its application potential in
data mining of traditional and western medicine imageomics and promoting precise
prevention and treatment of complex diseases.