LYSTO: Benchmark and hackathon for lymphocyte assessment
Reliable assessment of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes in immunohistochemistry is clinically relevant for prognosis and immunotherapy decision-making but remains time-consuming and subject to inter-observer variability.
Abstract
Reliable assessment of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes in immunohistochemistry is clinically relevant for prognosis and immunotherapy decision-making but remains time-consuming and subject to inter-observer variability. Within the international LYSTO initiative, I contributed to the development and consolidation of a benchmark initially introduced as a MICCAI 2019 hackathon. The benchmark comprises multi-center, multi-organ IHC datasets with over 170,000 cell-level annotations and formulates lymphocyte assessment as a weakly supervised learning problem. Multiple methods achieved pathologist-level agreement across institutions and organs, and extended analyses incorporating community feedback culminated in a comprehensive peer-reviewed publication in 2024.
Our role
Contributing collaborator with responsibility for methodological analysis, evaluation, and consolidation of benchmark results.
Perspective
LYSTO emphasizes the importance of sustained, community-driven benchmarking that extends beyond time-limited challenges. The experience informed subsequent work on multi-center robustness, evaluation, and trustworthy assessment of medical AI.
