Histopathology Slide Indexing and Search: Are We There Yet?

The search and retrieval of digital histopathology slides is an important task that has yet to be solved. In this case study, we investigate the clinical readiness of three state-of-the-art histopathology slide search engines, Yottixel, SISH, and RetCCL, on three patients with solid tumors. We provide a qualitative assessment of each model's performance in providing retrieval results that are reliable and useful to pathologists. We found that all three image search engines fail to produce consistently reliable results and have difficulties in capturing granular and subtle features of malignancy, limiting their diagnostic accuracy. Based on our findings, we also propose a minimal set of requirements to further advance the development of accurate and reliable histopathology image search engines for successful clinical adoption.

The State of Applying Artificial Intelligence to Tissue Imaging for Cancer Research and Early Detection

Artificial intelligence represents a new frontier in human medicine that could save more lives and reduce the costs, thereby increasing accessibility. As a consequence, the rate of advancement of AI in cancer medical imaging and more particularly tissue pathology has exploded, opening it to ethical and technical questions that could impede its adoption into existing systems. In order to chart the path of AI in its application to cancer tissue imaging, we review current work and identify how it can improve cancer pathology diagnostics and research. In this review, we identify 5 core tasks that models are developed for, including regression, classification, segmentation, generation, and compression tasks. We address the benefits and challenges that such methods face, and how they can be adapted for use in cancer prevention and treatment. The studies looked at in this paper represent the beginning of this field and future experiments will build on the foundations that we highlight.

Clinically Relevant Latent Space Embedding of Cancer Histopathology Slides through Variational Autoencoder Based Image Compression

In this paper, we introduce a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) based training approach that can compress and decompress cancer pathology slides at a compression ratio of 1:512, which is better than the previously reported state of the art (SOTA) in the literature, while still maintaining accuracy in clinical validation tasks. The compression approach was tested on more common computer vision datasets such as CIFAR10, and we explore which image characteristics enable this compression ratio on cancer imaging data but not generic images. We generate and visualize embeddings from the compressed latent space and demonstrate how they are useful for clinical interpretation of data, and how in the future such latent embeddings can be used to accelerate search of clinical imaging data.