Artificial Intelligence in Pediatric Pathology: The Extinction of a Medical Profession or the Key to a Bright Future?

Whole Slide Imaging, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning in Pediatric and Perinatal Pathology: Current Status and Future Directions

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into healthcare is becoming increasingly mainstream. Leveraging digital technologies, such as AI and deep learning, impacts researchers, clinicians, and industry due to promising performance and clinical potential. Digital pathology is now a proven technology, enabling generation of high-resolution digital images from glass slides (whole slide images; WSI). WSIs facilitates AI-based image analysis to aid pathologists in diagnostic tasks, improve workflow efficiency, and address workforce shortages. Example applications include tumor segmentation, disease classification, detection, quantitation and grading, rare object identification, and outcome prediction. While advancements have occurred, integration of WSI-AI into clinical laboratories faces challenges, including concerns regarding evidence quality, regulatory adaptations, clinical evaluation, and safety considerations. In pediatric and developmental histopathology, adoption of AI could improve diagnostic efficiency, automate routine tasks, and address specific diagnostic challenges unique to the specialty, such as standardizing placental pathology and developmental autopsy findings, as well as mitigating staffing shortages in the subspeciality. Additionally, AI-based tools have potential to mitigate medicolegal implications by enhancing reproducibility and objectivity in diagnostic evaluations. An overview of recent developments and challenges in applying AI to pediatric and developmental pathology, focusing on machine learning methods applied to WSIs of pediatric pathology specimens is presented.

The Promise of AI for Image-Driven Medicine: Qualitative Interview Study of Radiologists' and Pathologists' Perspectives

Background

Image-driven specialisms such as radiology and pathology are at the forefront of medical artificial intelligence (AI) innovation. Many believe that AI will lead to significant shifts in professional roles, so it is vital to investigate how professionals view the pending changes that AI innovation will initiate and incorporate their views in ongoing AI developments.

Objective

Our study aimed to gain insights into the perspectives and wishes of radiologists and pathologists regarding the promise of AI.

Methods

We have conducted the first qualitative interview study investigating the perspectives of both radiologists and pathologists regarding the integration of AI in their fields. The study design is in accordance with the consolidated criteria for reporting qualitative research (COREQ).

Results

In total, 21 participants were interviewed for this study (7 pathologists, 10 radiologists, and 4 computer scientists). The interviews revealed a diverse range of perspectives on the impact of AI. Respondents discussed various task-specific benefits of AI; yet, both pathologists and radiologists agreed that AI had yet to live up to its hype. Overall, our study shows that AI could facilitate welcome changes in the workflows of image-driven professionals and eventually lead to better quality of care. At the same time, these professionals also admitted that many hopes and expectations for AI were unlikely to become a reality in the next decade.

Conclusions

This study points to the importance of maintaining a "healthy skepticism" on the promise of AI in imaging specialisms and argues for more structural and inclusive discussions about whether AI is the right technology to solve current problems encountered in daily clinical practice.

Automated Deep Learning-Based Classification of Wilms Tumor Histopathology

(1) Background: Histopathological assessment of Wilms tumors (WT) is crucial for risk group classification to guide postoperative stratification in chemotherapy pre-treated WT cases. However, due to the heterogeneous nature of the tumor, significant interobserver variation between pathologists in WT diagnosis has been observed, potentially leading to misclassification and suboptimal treatment. We investigated whether artificial intelligence (AI) can contribute to accurate and reproducible histopathological assessment of WT through recognition of individual histopathological tumor components. (2) Methods: We assessed the performance of a deep learning-based AI system in quantifying WT components in hematoxylin and eosin-stained slides by calculating the Sørensen-Dice coefficient for fifteen predefined renal tissue components, including six tumor-related components. We trained the AI system using multiclass annotations from 72 whole-slide images of patients diagnosed with WT. (3) Results: The overall Dice coefficient for all fifteen tissue components was 0.85 and for the six tumor-related components was 0.79. Tumor segmentation worked best to reliably identify necrosis (Dice coefficient 0.98) and blastema (Dice coefficient 0.82). (4) Conclusions: Accurate histopathological classification of WT may be feasible using a digital pathology-based AI system in a national cohort of WT patients.

The Complex Cyto-Molecular Landscape of Thyroid Nodules in Pediatrics

Thyroid fine-needle aspiration (FNA) is a commonly used diagnostic cytological procedure in pediatric patients for the evaluation of thyroid nodules, triaging them for the detection of thyroid cancer. In recent years, greater attention has been paid to thyroid FNA in this setting, including the use of updated ultrasound score algorithms to improve accuracy and yield, especially considering the theoretically higher risk of malignancy of these lesions compared with the adult population, as well as to minimize patient discomfort. Moreover, molecular genetic testing for thyroid disease is an expanding field of research that could aid in distinguishing benign from cancerous nodules and assist in determining their clinical management. Finally, artificial intelligence tools can help in this task by performing a comprehensive analysis of all the obtained data. These advancements have led to greater reliance on FNA as a first-line diagnostic tool for pediatric thyroid disease. This review article provides an overview of these recent developments and their impact on the diagnosis and management of thyroid nodules in children.