AI-Triaged 3D Pathology to Improve Detection of Esophageal Neoplasia While Reducing Pathologist Workloads.

Modern pathology : an official journal of the United States and Canadian Academy of Pathology, Inc
Authors
Keywords
Abstract

Early detection of esophageal neoplasia via evaluation of endoscopic surveillance biopsies is the key to maximizing survival for patients with Barrett's esophagus, but it is hampered by the sampling limitations of conventional slide-based histopathology. Comprehensive evaluation of whole biopsies with three-dimensional (3D) pathology may improve early detection of malignancies, but large 3D pathology data sets are tedious for pathologists to analyze. Here, we present a deep learning-based method to automatically identify the most critical 2D image sections within 3D pathology data sets for pathologists to review. Our method first generates a 3D heatmap of neoplastic risk for each biopsy, then classifies all 2D image sections within the 3D data set in order of neoplastic risk. In a clinical validation study, we diagnose esophageal biopsies with AI-triaged 3D pathology (3 images per biopsy) vs standard slide-based histopathology (16 images per biopsy) and show that our method improves detection sensitivity while reducing pathologist workloads.

Year of Publication
2023
Journal
Modern pathology : an official journal of the United States and Canadian Academy of Pathology, Inc
Volume
36
Issue
12
Pages
100322
Date Published
08/2023
ISSN
1530-0285
DOI
10.1016/j.modpat.2023.100322
PubMed ID
37657711
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