SpiderMass ambient mass spectrometry and multimodal machine learning enable ex vivo ovarian cancer typing and exploratory immunoscoring.

Journal: Journal of advanced research
Published Date:

Abstract

Complete cytoreductive surgery remains one of the strongest determinants of outcome in ovarian cancer, yet surgeons still lack rapid tissue-assessment tools that can be repeated throughout an operation. Here we evaluated whether SpiderMass ambient mass spectrometry, combined with machine-learning models, could support ex vivo ovarian tissue typing and exploratory immune microenvironment mapping. A total of 128 ovarian specimens, from 119 patients, were analyzed to train subtype-classification models from fresh-frozen and formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) material, and 24 independent tissues (from 16 patients) were reserved for blinded region-level testing. Initial PCA-LDA models were improved by screening 24 classifiers; Ridge models reached up to 97% 5-fold cross-validation accuracy on the combined cohort. In blinded analyses, the mixed Ridge model produced the fewest errors, although misclassification remained concentrated in underrepresented endometrioid regions. A dual-input network combining SpiderMass spectra with digitized histology improved internal performance to 99% in 5-fold cross-validation and 100% on a small, blinded image-spectrum set, outperforming the molecular-only branch. Model explanation followed by MALDI-MSI cross-checking identified 26 subtype-associated lipids. We then trained a LightGBM cell-state model from immune and epithelial cell spectra and applied it to SpiderMass imaging data. Spatial predictions were broadly concordant with multiplex MALDI-IHC and highlighted subtype-specific differences in immune-cell distribution. In an exploratory analysis of eight high-grade serous carcinoma samples obtained before chemotherapy, longer survivalappeared to be associated with higher lymphocyte scores, higher M1-like macrophage scores and a higher M1/M2 ratio, whereas shorter survival appeared to be associated with higher cancer-cell scores. These data support SpiderMass as a promising ex vivo platform for ovarian cancer typing and hypothesis-generating immunoscoring, while underscoring the need for prospective intraoperative studies, orthogonal biomarker validation, validation in larger cohorts for exploratory immunoscoring and multicenter patient-level external validation before clinical implementation.

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