Improving the Diagnosis of Skin Biopsies Using Tissue Segmentation

Abstract

Invasive melanoma, a common type of skin cancer, is considered one of the deadliest. Pathologists routinely evaluate melanocytic lesions to determine the amount of atypia, and if the lesion represents an invasive melanoma, its stage. However, due to the complicated nature of these assessments, inter- and intra-observer variability among pathologists in their interpretation are very common. Machine-learning techniques have shown impressive and robust performance on various tasks including healthcare. In this work, we study the potential of including semantic segmentation of clinically important tissue structure in improving the diagnosis of skin biopsy images. Our experimental results show a 6% improvement in F-score when using whole slide images along with epidermal nests and cancerous dermal nest segmentation masks compared to using whole-slide images alone in training and testing the diagnosis pipeline.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Jul 14, 2022
Source ID
10.3390/diagnostics12071713

Entities

People

  • Beibin Li
  • Caitlin J. May
  • Joann Elmore
  • Linda G. Shapiro
  • Mojgan Mokhtari
  • Oliver H. Chang
  • Shima Nofallah
  • Stevan Knezevich
  • Wenjun Wu

Organizations

  • Melanoma Research Alliance
  • National Cancer Institute
  • United States Department of Defense

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Computer science
  • Medicine

Readers

  • Medical Imaging.
  • Molecular and Cellular Biology
  • Neural Network Machine Learning.

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Neural Networks