Pathology Report Generation and Multimodal Representation Learning for Cutaneous Melanocytic Lesions

Millions of melanocytic skin lesions are examined by pathologists each year, the majority of which concern common nevi (i.e., ordinary moles). While most of these lesions can be diagnosed in seconds, writing the corresponding pathology report is much more time-consuming. Automating part of the report writing could, therefore, alleviate the increasing workload of pathologists. In this work, we develop a vision-language model specifically for the pathology domain of cutaneous melanocytic lesions. The model follows the Contrastive Captioner framework and was trained and evaluated using a melanocytic lesion dataset of 42,512 H&E-stained whole slide images and 19,645 corresponding pathology reports. Our results show that the quality scores of model-generated reports were on par with pathologist-written reports for common nevi, assessed by an expert pathologist in a reader study. While report generation revealed to be more difficult for rare melanocytic lesion subtypes, the cross-modal retrieval performance for these cases was considerably better.

On the Importance of Text Preprocessing for Multimodal Representation Learning and Pathology Report Generation

Vision-language models in pathology enable multimodal case retrieval and automated report generation. Many of the models developed so far, however, have been trained on pathology reports that include information which cannot be inferred from paired whole slide images (e.g., patient history), potentially leading to hallucinated sentences in generated reports. To this end, we investigate how the selection of information from pathology reports for vision-language modeling affects the quality of the multimodal representations and generated reports. More concretely, we compare a model trained on full reports against a model trained on preprocessed reports that only include sentences describing the cell and tissue appearances based on the H&E-stained slides. For the experiments, we built upon the BLIP-2 framework and used a cutaneous melanocytic lesion dataset of 42,433 H&E-stained whole slide images and 19,636 corresponding pathology reports. Model performance was assessed using image-to-text and text-to-image retrieval, as well as qualitative evaluation of the generated reports by an expert pathologist. Our results demonstrate that text preprocessing prevents hallucination in report generation. Despite the improvement in the quality of the generated reports, training the vision-language model on full reports showed better cross-modal retrieval performance.

Artificial Intelligence-Based Triaging of Cutaneous Melanocytic Lesions

Pathologists are facing an increasing workload due to a growing volume of cases and the need for more comprehensive diagnoses. Aiming to facilitate workload reduction and faster turnaround times, we developed an artificial intelligence (AI) model for triaging cutaneous melanocytic lesions based on whole slide images. The AI model was developed and validated using a retrospective cohort from the UMC Utrecht. The dataset consisted of 52,202 whole slide images from 27,167 unique specimens, acquired from 20,707 patients. Specimens with only common nevi were assigned to the low complexity category (86.6%). In contrast, specimens with any other melanocytic lesion subtype, including non-common nevi, melanocytomas, and melanomas, were assigned to the high complexity category (13.4%). The dataset was split on patient level into a development set (80%) and test sets (20%) for independent evaluation. Predictive performance was primarily measured using the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) and the area under the precision-recall curve (AUPRC). A simulation experiment was performed to study the effect of implementing AI-based triaging in the clinic. The AI model reached an AUROC of 0.966 (95% CI, 0.960-0.972) and an AUPRC of 0.857 (95% CI, 0.836-0.877) on the in-distribution test set, and an AUROC of 0.899 (95% CI, 0.860-0.934) and an AUPRC of 0.498 (95% CI, 0.360-0.639) on the out-of-distribution test set. In the simulation experiment, using random case assignment as baseline, AI-based triaging prevented an average of 43.9 (95% CI, 36-55) initial examinations of high complexity cases by general pathologists for every 500 cases. In conclusion, the AI model achieved a strong predictive performance in differentiating between cutaneous melanocytic lesions of high and low complexity. The improvement in workflow efficiency due to AI-based triaging could be substantial.