From CNNs to Vision Transformers -- A Comprehensive Evaluation of Deep Learning Models for Histopathology

While machine learning is currently transforming the field of histopathology, the domain lacks a comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art models based on essential but complementary quality requirements beyond a mere classification accuracy. In order to fill this gap, we conducted an extensive evaluation by benchmarking a wide range of classification models, including recent vision transformers, convolutional neural networks and hybrid models comprising transformer and convolutional models. We thoroughly tested the models on five widely used histopathology datasets containing whole slide images of breast, gastric, and colorectal cancer and developed a novel approach using an image-to-image translation model to assess the robustness of a cancer classification model against stain variations. Further, we extended existing interpretability methods to previously unstudied models and systematically reveal insights of the models' classification strategies that allow for plausibility checks and systematic comparisons. The study resulted in specific model recommendations for practitioners as well as putting forward a general methodology to quantify a model's quality according to complementary requirements that can be transferred to future model architectures.

Predicting the Binding of SARS-CoV-2 Peptides to the Major Histocompatibility Complex with Recurrent Neural Networks

Predicting the binding of viral peptides to the major histocompatibility complex with machine learning can potentially extend the computational immunology toolkit for vaccine development, and serve as a key component in the fight against a pandemic. In this work, we adapt and extend USMPep, a recently proposed, conceptually simple prediction algorithm based on recurrent neural networks. Most notably, we combine regressors (binding affinity data) and classifiers (mass spectrometry data) from qualitatively different data sources to obtain a more comprehensive prediction tool. We evaluate the performance on a recently released SARS-CoV-2 dataset with binding stability measurements. USMPep not only sets new benchmarks on selected single alleles, but consistently turns out to be among the best-performing methods or, for some metrics, to be even the overall best-performing method for this task.