Automated identification of malignancy in whole-slide pathological images: identification of eyelid malignant melanoma in gigapixel pathological slides using deep learning

Abstract

Background/aims: To develop a deep learning system (DLS) that can automatically detect malignant melanoma (MM) in the eyelid from histopathological sections with colossal information density.

Methods: Setting: Double institutional study.

Study population: We retrospectively reviewed 225 230 pathological patches (small section cut from pathologist-labelled area from an H&E image), cut from 155 H&E-stained whole-slide images (WSI).

Observation procedures: Labelled gigapixel pathological WSIs were used to train and test a model designed to assign patch-level classification. Using malignant probability from a convolutional neural network, the patches were embedded back into each WSI to generate a visualisation heatmap and leveraged a random forest model to establish a WSI-level diagnosis.

Main outcome measure(s): For classification, the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), accuracy, sensitivity and specificity were used to evaluate the efficacy of the DLS in detecting MM.

Results: For patch diagnosis, the model achieved an AUC of 0.989 (95% CI 0.989 to 0.991), with an accuracy, sensitivity and specificity of 94.9%, 94.7% and 95.3%, respectively. We displayed the lesion area on the WSIs as graded by malignant potential. For WSI, the obtained sensitivity, specificity and accuracy were 100%, 96.5% and 98.2%, respectively, with an AUC of 0.998 (95% CI 0.994 to 1.000).

Conclusion: Our DLS, which uses artificial intelligence, can automatically detect MM in histopathological slides and highlight the lesion area on WSIs using a probabilistic heatmap. In addition, our approach has the potential to be applied to the histopathological sections of other tumour types.

Keywords: eyelids; pathology; telemedicine.