Fig. 8: Overview of the PD-L1 QCS analysis pipeline.

In the first step (left), WSI are inspected and pathologists’ annotation of the tumor center are added. Next, the tumor center is segmented into four classes on region-level and four classes on cell level. Subsequently, the staining intensity is calculated to measure PD-L1 expression of each pixel (brighter pixels indicate higher intensity). Finally, image-derived features are calculated, e.g., percentage of positive tumor cells and descriptive statistics of the staining intensity distribution.