Rendering cancer diagnoses from biopsy slides involves challenging tasks for pathologists, such as detecting micro metastases in tissue biopsies, or distinguishing tumors from benign tissue that can look deceivingly similar. These tasks are typically very difficult for humans, and, consequently, over- and under-diagnoses are not uncommon, resulting in non-optimal treatment. Algorithmic approaches for pathology, on the other hand, face their own set of challenges in the form of gigapixel images, proprietary data formats, and low availability of digitized images let alone high quality labels. However, advances in deep learning, access to cloud based storage, and the recent FDA approval of the first whole slide image scanner for primary diagnosis now set the stage for a new era of digital pathology. This talk will discuss the potential of deep learning to improve the accuracy and availability of cancer diagnostics, and highlight some recent advances towards that goal.

Date Published: 12 April 2018
PDF
Proc. SPIE 10581, Medical Imaging 2018: Digital Pathology, 1058102 (12 April 2018); doi: 10.1117/12.2291645

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 10581:
Medical Imaging 2018: Digital Pathology
John E. Tomaszewski; Metin N. Gurcan, Editor(s)