Dataset Information

Quality control stress test for deep learning-based diagnostic model in digital pathology.

ABSTRACT: Digital pathology provides a possibility for computational analysis of histological slides and automatization of routine pathological tasks. Histological slides are very heterogeneous concerning staining, sections' thickness, and artifacts arising during tissue processing, cutting, staining, and digitization. In this study, we digitally reproduce major types of artifacts. Using six datasets from four different institutions digitized by different scanner systems, we systematically explore artifacts' influence on the accuracy of the pre-trained, validated, deep learning-based model for prostate cancer detection in histological slides. We provide evidence that any histological artifact dependent on severity can lead to a substantial loss in model performance. Strategies for the prevention of diagnostic model accuracy losses in the context of artifacts are warranted. Stress-testing of diagnostic models using synthetically generated artifacts might be an essential step during clinical validation of deep learning-based algorithms.

SUBMITTER: Schomig-Markiefka B

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8592835 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Quality control stress test for deep learning-based diagnostic model in digital pathology.

Schömig-Markiefka Birgid B Pryalukhin Alexey A Hulla Wolfgang W Bychkov Andrey A Fukuoka Junya J Madabhushi Anant A Achter Viktor V Nieroda Lech L Büttner Reinhard R Quaas Alexander A Tolkach Yuri Y

Modern pathology : an official journal of the United States and Canadian Academy of Pathology, Inc 20210624 12

Digital pathology provides a possibility for computational analysis of histological slides and automatization of routine pathological tasks. Histological slides are very heterogeneous concerning staining, sections' thickness, and artifacts arising during tissue processing, cutting, staining, and digitization. In this study, we digitally reproduce major types of artifacts. Using six datasets from four different institutions digitized by different scanner systems, we systematically explore artifac ...[more]

PMID: 34168282

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Project description:For a method to be widely adopted in medical research or clinical practice, it needs to be reproducible so that clinicians and regulators can have confidence in its use. Machine learning and deep learning have a particular set of challenges around reproducibility. Small differences in the settings or the data used for training a model can lead to large differences in the outcomes of experiments. In this work, three top-performing algorithms from the Camelyon grand challenges are reproduced using only information presented in the associated papers and the results are then compared to those reported. Seemingly minor details were found to be critical to performance and yet their importance is difficult to appreciate until the actual reproduction is attempted. We observed that authors generally describe the key technical aspects of their models well but fail to maintain the same reporting standards when it comes to data preprocessing which is essential to reproducibility. As an important contribution of the present study and its findings, we introduce a reproducibility checklist that tabulates information that needs to be reported in histopathology ML-based work in order to make it reproducible. Author summary For a method to be used a lot in medical research or clinical practice, it needs to be able to be reproduced so that people can trust it. Machine learning and deep learning have some challenges around this. For example, small changes in how a model is trained can lead to significant changes in the results of experiments. This makes it essential that researchers report how they do things in enough detail for the results of their experiments to be reproducible. In this work, we looked at three different algorithms used for digital pathology image analysis. We tried to reproduce them using only the information reported in their papers. We confirmed that even minor details could be essential. Authors often do not report all the details needed to reproduce their work. We also created a checklist of things that need to be reported to help other researchers make their work reproducible.

Project description:PURPOSE:Digital pathology (DP), referring to the digitization of tissue slides, is beginning to change the landscape of clinical diagnostic workflows and has engendered active research within the area of computational pathology. One of the challenges in DP is the presence of artefacts and batch effects, unintentionally introduced during both routine slide preparation (eg, staining, tissue folding) and digitization (eg, blurriness, variations in contrast and hue). Manual review of glass and digital slides is laborious, qualitative, and subject to intra- and inter-reader variability. Therefore, there is a critical need for a reproducible automated approach of precisely localizing artefacts to identify slides that need to be reproduced or regions that should be avoided during computational analysis. METHODS:Here we present HistoQC, a tool for rapidly performing quality control to not only identify and delineate artefacts but also discover cohort-level outliers (eg, slides stained darker or lighter than others in the cohort). This open-source tool employs a combination of image metrics (eg, color histograms, brightness, contrast), features (eg, edge detectors), and supervised classifiers (eg, pen detection) to identify artefact-free regions on digitized slides. These regions and metrics are presented to the user via an interactive graphical user interface, facilitating artefact detection through real-time visualization and filtering. These same metrics afford users the opportunity to explicitly define acceptable tolerances for their workflows. RESULTS:The output of HistoQC on 450 slides from The Cancer Genome Atlas was reviewed by two pathologists and found to be suitable for computational analysis more than 95% of the time. CONCLUSION:These results suggest that HistoQC could provide an automated, quantifiable, quality control process for identifying artefacts and measuring slide quality, in turn helping to improve both the repeatability and robustness of DP workflows.

Dataset Information

Quality control stress test for deep learning-based diagnostic model in digital pathology.

Publications

Quality control stress test for deep learning-based diagnostic model in digital pathology.

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