Background
The possibility of digitizing whole-slide images (WSI) of tissue has led to the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) in digital pathology. Advances in precision oncology have resulted in an increasing demand for predictive assays that enable mining of subvisual morphometric phenotypes and might improve patient care ultimately. Hence, a pathologist-annotated and artificial intelligence-empowered platform for integration and analysis of WSI data and molecular detection data in tumors was established, called PAI-WSIT (http://www.paiwsit.com).
Methods
The standardized data collection process was used for data collection in PAI-WSIT, while a multifunctional annotation tool was developed and a user-friendly search engine and web interface were integrated for the database access. Furthermore, deep learning frameworks were applied in two tasks to detect malignant regions and classify phenotypic subtypes in colorectal cancers (CRCs), respectively.
Results
PAI-WSIT recorded 8633 WSIs of 1772 tumor cases, of which CRC from four regional hospitals in China and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) were the main ones, as well as cancers in breast, lung, prostate, bladder, and kidneys from two Chinese hospitals. A total of 1298 WSIs with high-quality annotations were evaluated by a panel of 8 pathologists. Gene detection reports of 582 tumor cases were collected. Clinical information of all tumor cases was documented. Besides, we reached overall accuracy of 0.933 in WSI classification for malignant region detection of CRC, and aera under the curves (AUC) of 0.719 on colorectal subtype dataset.
Conclusions
Collectively, the annotation function, data integration and AI function analysis of PAI-WSIT provide support for AI-assisted tumor diagnosis, all of which have provided a comprehensive curation of carcinomas pathology.