Automated reporting of cervical biopsies using artificial intelligence

PLOS Digit Health. 2024 Apr 22;3(4):e0000381. doi: 10.1371/journal.pdig.0000381. eCollection 2024 Apr.

Abstract

When detected at an early stage, the 5-year survival rate for people with invasive cervical cancer is 92%. Being aware of signs and symptoms of cervical cancer and early detection greatly improve the chances of successful treatment. We have developed an Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithm, trained and evaluated on cervical biopsies for automated reporting of digital diagnostics. The aim is to increase overall efficiency of pathological diagnosis and to have the performance tuned to high sensitivity for malignant cases. Having a tool for triage/identifying cancer and high grade lesions may potentially reduce reporting time by identifying areas of interest in a slide for the pathologist and therefore improving efficiency. We trained and validated our algorithm on 1738 cervical WSIs with one WSI per patient. On the independent test set of 811 WSIs, we achieved 93.4% malignant sensitivity for classifying slides. Recognising a WSI, with our algorithm, takes approximately 1.5 minutes on the NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPU. Whole slide images of different formats (TIFF, iSyntax, and CZI) can be processed using this code, and it is easily extendable to other formats.

Grants and funding

For all authors this work is supported by the Industrial Centre for AI Research in digital Diagnostics (iCAIRD) which is funded by Innovate UK on behalf of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) [project number: 104690], and in part by Chief Scientist Office, Scotland. DJH, DHB, OA and GB received funding from UKRI (funder project reference: TS/S013121/1). MM, DM and CF received salaries from UKRI for this project. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.