Ronald de Krijger

Princess Máxima

In short, Ronald de Krijger's research entails the following:

Artificial intelligence for risk group classification and staging of Wilms tumors

Wilms tumor are the most common malignant pediatric renal tumors. They are currently treated with preoperative chemotherapy, surgical resection of the primary tumor and postoperative chemo- and/or radiotherapy, according to the UMBRELLA protocol, which is used in most European countries and beyond. Histopathology of the resection specimen is crucial for risk group classification into one of three risk groups and for local staging, both of which are then translated into postoperative management.

However, pathological assessment is inherently subjective, with up to 20% discrepancies between pathologists, according to the literature. Automated analysis with supervised machine learning will lead to robust and reproducible recognition of tissue and tumor components, as we have shown in our preliminary work.

In the current project, we will expand on our previous work to segmentation of all relevant components needed for risk group classification. In addition, we will use the same methodology for detection of staging-related criteria.

Finally, we will combine the risk group classification and staging criteria to come to an integrated diagnosis as now done by pathologists. This will not only be less time-consuming than the current manual inspection, but will also lead to more reproducible classification.