Dr. Ole-Johan Skrede Successfully Defends his Doctoral Thesis

Dr. Skrede's research focuses on advancing cancer diagnostics through the application of deep learning techniques to analyze histological images. One significant outcome of his work is the development of methods to estimate the prognosis of patients who have undergone colorectal cancer surgery. This innovative approach involves digital microscope image analysis to identify cancerous regions and assess their severity. By training deep learning models on tissue sections from approximately 2,500 patients, Dr. Skrede and his colleagues have developed a deep learning model that enhances the accuracy of prognosis predictions, leading to better stratification of patients to adjuvant chemotherapy after surgery. The research team has rigorously evaluated this methodology on over 1,000 patients to demonstrate its validity and usefulness in clinical practice. Notably, the new method allows identification of substantially more patients that could be spared from unnecessary adjuvant therapy.

Dr. Skrede's doctoral thesis comprises three papers published in high-impact journals, significantly contributing to medical research and the recent DoMore project, an ICT Lighthous Project supported by the Research Council of Norway. The papers highlight the integration of deep learning with traditional pathological markers to optimize treatment for patients suffering from colorectal cancer, the possibility to automatically segmented any type of tumor, perhaps even rare types not included in the model development, as well as laying the foundation for better design of deep learning studies in cancer diagnostics and beyond.

Before defending his thesis, Dr. Skrede presented a trial lecture at the same venue, on the subject: “Foundation models in cancer research”.

The adjudication committee

• Professor Paul J van Diest, Department of Pathology, University Medical Center Utrecht, the Netherlands
• Professor emeritus Arvid Lundervold, Department of Biomedicine, University of Bergen, Norway
• Professor Anne Solberg, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, Norway

Supervisors

Ole-Johan Skrede's supervisors throughout his doctoral journey have been Professor Emeritus Fritz Albregtsen at the Department of Informatics, UiO, Norway, and the late Professor Håvard E. Danielsen, at the Institute for Cancer Genetics and Informatics (ICGI), Oslo University Hospital, Norway.

Ole-Johan will continue his research at ICGI, being an important contributor to many of our most prestigious projects.

We extend our gratitude to the committee members for their invaluable insights and to Professor Xing Cai for chairing the defense.