scholarly journals Digital Pathology: Advantages, Limitations and Emerging Perspectives

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (11) ◽  
pp. 3697
Author(s):  
Stephan W. Jahn ◽  
Markus Plass ◽  
Farid Moinfar

Digital pathology is on the verge of becoming a mainstream option for routine diagnostics. Faster whole slide image scanning has paved the way for this development, but implementation on a large scale is challenging on technical, logistical, and financial levels. Comparative studies have published reassuring data on safety and feasibility, but implementation experiences highlight the need for training and the knowledge of pitfalls. Up to half of the pathologists are reluctant to sign out reports on only digital slides and are concerned about reporting without the tool that has represented their profession since its beginning. Guidelines by international pathology organizations aim to safeguard histology in the digital realm, from image acquisition over the setup of work-stations to long-term image archiving, but must be considered a starting point only. Cost-efficiency analyses and occupational health issues need to be addressed comprehensively. Image analysis is blended into the traditional work-flow, and the approval of artificial intelligence for routine diagnostics starts to challenge human evaluation as the gold standard. Here we discuss experiences from past digital pathology implementations, future possibilities through the addition of artificial intelligence, technical and occupational health challenges, and possible changes to the pathologist’s profession.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yang Yang ◽  
Xueyan Mei ◽  
Philip Robson ◽  
Brett Marinelli ◽  
Mingqian Huang ◽  
...  

Abstract Most current medical imaging Artificial Intelligence (AI) relies upon transfer learning using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) created using ImageNet, a large database of natural world images, including cats, dogs, and vehicles. Size, diversity, and similarity of the source data determine the success of the transfer learning on the target data. ImageNet is large and diverse, but there is a significant dissimilarity between its natural world images and medical images, leading Cheplygina to pose the question, “Why do we still use images of cats to help Artificial Intelligence interpret CAT scans?”. We present an equally large and diversified database, RadImageNet, consisting of 5 million annotated medical images consisting of CT, MRI, and ultrasound of musculoskeletal, neurologic, oncologic, gastrointestinal, endocrine, and pulmonary pathologies over 450,000 patients. The database is unprecedented in scale and breadth in the medical imaging field, constituting a more appropriate basis for medical imaging transfer learning applications. We found that RadImageNet transfer learning outperformed ImageNet in multiple independent applications, including improvements for bone age prediction from hand and wrist x-rays by 1.75 months (p<0.0001), pneumonia detection in ICU chest x-rays by 0.85% (p<0.0001), ACL tear detection on MRI by 10.72% (p<0.0001), SARS-CoV-2 detection on chest CT by 0.25% (p<0.0001) and hemorrhage detection on head CT by 0.13% (p<0.0001). The results indicate that our pre-trained models that are open-sourced on public domains will be a better starting point for transfer learning in radiologic imaging AI applications, including applications involving medical imaging modalities or anatomies not included in the RadImageNet database.


Author(s):  
Joshua J. Levy ◽  
Christopher R. Jackson ◽  
Christian C. Haudenschild ◽  
Brock C. Christensen ◽  
Louis J. Vaickus

AbstractImage registration involves finding the best alignment between different images of the same object. In these tasks, the object in question is viewed differently in each of the images (e.g. different rotation or light conditions, etc.). In digital pathology, image registration aligns correspondent regions of tissue from different stereotactic viewpoints (e.g. subsequent deeper sections of the same tissue). These comparisons are important for histological analysis and can facilitate previously unavailable manipulations, such as 3D tissue reconstruction and cell-level alignment of immunohistochemical (IHC) and special stains. Several benchmarks have been established for evaluating image registration techniques for histological tissue; however, little work has evaluated the impact of scaling registration techniques to Giga-Pixel Whole Slide Images (WSI), which are large enough for significant memory limitations, and contain recurrent patterns and deformations that hinder traditional alignment algorithms. Furthermore, as tissue sections often contain multiple, discrete, smaller tissue fragments, it is unnecessary to align an entire image when the bulk of the image is background whitespace and tissue fragments’ orientations are often agnostic of each other. We present a methodology for circumventing large-scale image registration issues in histopathology and accompanying software. By removing background pixels, parsing the slide into discrete tissue segments, and matching, orienting and registering smaller segment pairs, we recovered registrations with lower Target Registration Error (TRE) when compared to utilizing the unmanipulated WSI. We tested our technique by having a pathologist annotate landmarks from 13 pairs of differently stained liver biopsy slides, performing WSI and segment-based registration techniques, and comparing overall TRE. Preliminary results demonstrate superior performance of registering segment pairs versus registering WSI (difference of median TRE of 44 pixels, p<0.001). Segment matching within WSI is an effective solution for histology image registration but requires further testing and validation to ensure its viability for stain translation and 3D histology analysis.


2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 277-294 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver C. Turner ◽  
Famke Aeffner ◽  
Dinesh S. Bangari ◽  
Wanda High ◽  
Brian Knight ◽  
...  

Toxicologic pathology is transitioning from analog to digital methods. This transition seems inevitable due to a host of ongoing social and medical technological forces. Of these, artificial intelligence (AI) and in particular machine learning (ML) are globally disruptive, rapidly growing sectors of technology whose impact on the long-established field of histopathology is quickly being realized. The development of increasing numbers of algorithms, peering ever deeper into the histopathological space, has demonstrated to the scientific community that AI pathology platforms are now poised to truly impact the future of precision and personalized medicine. However, as with all great technological advances, there are implementation and adoption challenges. This review aims to define common and relevant AI and ML terminology, describe data generation and interpretation, outline current and potential future business cases, discuss validation and regulatory hurdles, and most importantly, propose how overcoming the challenges of this burgeoning technology may shape toxicologic pathology for years to come, enabling pathologists to contribute even more effectively to answering scientific questions and solving global health issues. [Box: see text]


2020 ◽  
Vol 245 ◽  
pp. 09011
Author(s):  
Michael Hildreth ◽  
Kenyi Paolo Hurtado Anampa ◽  
Cody Kankel ◽  
Scott Hampton ◽  
Paul Brenner ◽  
...  

The NSF-funded Scalable CyberInfrastructure for Artificial Intelligence and Likelihood Free Inference (SCAILFIN) project aims to develop and deploy artificial intelligence (AI) and likelihood-free inference (LFI) techniques and software using scalable cyberinfrastructure (CI) built on top of existing CI elements. Specifically, the project has extended the CERN-based REANA framework, a cloud-based data analysis platform deployed on top of Kubernetes clusters that was originally designed to enable analysis reusability and reproducibility. REANA is capable of orchestrating extremely complicated multi-step workflows, and uses Kubernetes clusters both for scheduling and distributing container-based workloads across a cluster of available machines, as well as instantiating and monitoring the concrete workloads themselves. This work describes the challenges and development efforts involved in extending REANA and the components that were developed in order to enable large scale deployment on High Performance Computing (HPC) resources. Using the Virtual Clusters for Community Computation (VC3) infrastructure as a starting point, we implemented REANA to work with a number of differing workload managers, including both high performance and high throughput, while simultaneously removing REANA’s dependence on Kubernetes support at the workers level.


Author(s):  
Talat Zehra ◽  
Asma Shaikh ◽  
Maheen Shams

Pathology particularly histopathology is considered to be a busy and challenging field. It is considered as gold standard for the diagnosis and management of patient particularly in cases of tumor. It has been more than twenty years since the introduction of whole slide imaging (WSI) in the developed part of the world. Various whole slide image (WSI) devices and use of artificial intelligence (AI) based softwares have transformed the field of Pathology1. Digital pathology is a novel technology and currently being implemented in most of the developed part of the world.2 Once the patient’s data becomes digital, it is easily stored, reproducible on a single click and quality remains same. This data can be used to make disease models, disease trends and predict the outcome of a particular disease through data mining which will open new horizons of precise medicine. The use of WSI with computational pathology and data storage devices have revolutionized the working in histopathology. The world witnessed an exponential rise in its adoption particularly after Covid-19 pandemic1. However, in the developing world either it is not being implemented or its use is still sub-optimal. By realizing the potential of digital and computational pathology along with the use of artificial intelligence software, we can bring a drastic change in the field of personalized medicine in the developing part of the world 3. Numerous validation studies have been published indicating that WSI is a reliable tool for routine diagnosis in surgical pathology 4   Continuous...


2020 ◽  
Vol 144 (11) ◽  
pp. 1397-1400 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zi Long Chow ◽  
Aye Aye Thike ◽  
Hui Hua Li ◽  
Nur Diyana Md Nasir ◽  
Joe Poh Sheng Yeong ◽  
...  

Context.— Mitotic count is an important histologic criterion for grading and prognostication in phyllodes tumors (PTs). Counting mitoses is a routine practice for pathologists evaluating neoplasms, but different microscopes, variable field selection, and areas have led to possible misclassification. Objective.— To determine whether 10 high-power fields (HPFs) or whole slide mitotic counts correlated better with PT clinicopathologic parameters using digital pathology (DP). We also aimed to find out whether this study might serve as a basis for an artificial intelligence (AI) protocol to count mitosis. Design.— Representative slides were chosen from 93 cases of PTs diagnosed between 2014 and 2015. The slides were scanned and viewed with DP. Mitotic counting was conducted on the whole slide image, before choosing 10 HPFs and demarcating the tumor area in DP. Values of mitoses per millimeter squared were used to compare results between 10 HPFs and the whole slide. Correlations with clinicopathologic parameters were conducted. Results.— Both whole slide counting of mitoses and 10 HPFs had similar statistically significant correlation coefficients with grade, stromal atypia, and stromal hypercellularity. Neither whole slide mitotic counts nor mitoses per 10 HPFs showed statistically significant correlations with patient age and tumor size. Conclusions.— Accurate mitosis counting in breast PTs is important for grading. Exploring machine learning on digital whole slides may influence approaches to training, testing, and validation of a future AI algorithm.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yang Deng ◽  
Min Feng ◽  
Yong Jiang ◽  
Yanyan Zhou ◽  
Hangyu Qing ◽  
...  

Abstract Background: Pathology plays a very important role in the cancer diagnosis, as the gold standard for the identification of tumors. The rapid development of digital pathology (DP) which based on Whole Slide Image (WSI) has led to many improvements in telepathological consultation, digital management, and computer-assisted diagnosis by artificial intelligence (AI). In DP, the common digitization strategy is to scan the pathology slice with X20 or X40 objective. Usually, the X40's WSI is 4 times bigger than the X20's, and obviously, the storage space and transmission time of the data should be 4 times. These increased costs will be great negative factor in the popularization of DP. But at the same time, some cases have to use the high magnification WSI for reliable diagnosis. Methods: In this article, we present a novel super-resolution process which could be used for WSI through Deep Learning. This process powered by AI, have the ability to switch X20 WSI to X40 without loss of whole and locally features. Furthermore, we collect the examples of WSI data of patients with 100 uterine leiomyosarcoma and adult granulosa cell tumor (AGCT) of ovary respectively, which are used to test our super-resolution process. Results: We used the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), the structural similarity (SSIM), and the Blind/Referenceless Image Spatial QUality Evaluator (BRISQUE) to test the resulting X40 WSI synthesized by the super-resolution (SR), which were 42.03, 0.99 and 49.22 . Then, we tested our SR images from subjective evaluation of the pathologist's perspective, and tested that if the pathologists could objectively distinguish the images between SR and high-resolution (HR), to further confirm the consistency between our SR images and the real HR images. Conclusions: The testing results indicate that the X40 WSI synthesized by the super-resolution matches the performance of the one generated from the X40 objective in diagnosis of both tumors. We believe that this is a reliable method can be used in a variety of tumors' digital slides, and will be available for a large scale in clinical pathology as an innovative technique.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Otálora ◽  
Roger Schaer ◽  
Oscar Jimenez-del-Toro ◽  
Manfredo Atzori ◽  
Henning Müller

ABSTRACTClinical practice is getting increasingly stressful for pathologists due to increasing complexity and time constraints. Histopathology is slowly shifting to digital pathology, thus creating opportunities to allow pathologists to improve reading quality or save time using Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based applications. We aim to enhance the practice of pathologists through a retrieval system that allows them to simplify their workflow, limit the need for second opinions, while also learning in the process. In this work, an innovative retrieval system for digital pathology is integrated within a Whole Slide Image (WSI) viewer, allowing to define regions of interest in images as queries for finding visually similar areas using deep representations. The back-end similarity computation algorithms are based on a multimodal approach, allowing to exploit both text information and content-based image features. Shallow and deep representations of the images were evaluated, the later showed a better overall retrieval performance in a set of 112 whole slide images from biopsies. The system was also tested by pathologists, highlighting its capabilities and suggesting possible ways to improve it and make it more usable in clinical practice. The retrieval system developed can enhance the practice of pathologists by enabling them to use their experience and knowledge to properly control artificial intelligence tools for navigating repositories of images for decision support purposes.


CCIT Journal ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 170-176
Author(s):  
Anggit Dwi Hartanto ◽  
Aji Surya Mandala ◽  
Dimas Rio P.L. ◽  
Sidiq Aminudin ◽  
Andika Yudirianto

Pacman is one of the labyrinth-shaped games where this game has used artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence is composed of several algorithms that are inserted in the program and Implementation of the dijkstra algorithm as a method of solving problems that is a minimum route problem on ghost pacman, where ghost plays a role chase player. The dijkstra algorithm uses a principle similar to the greedy algorithm where it starts from the first point and the next point is connected to get to the destination, how to compare numbers starting from the starting point and then see the next node if connected then matches one path with the path). From the results of the testing phase, it was found that the dijkstra algorithm is quite good at solving the minimum route solution to pursue the player, namely by getting a value of 13 according to manual calculations


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