2. Pitfalls of Traditional Diagnostic Workflow
for Lymph Node Metastasis
1. Repetitive & tedious
2. Time-consuming: need to count
nodes and write report
3. Risk of missing out micro-
metastases in difficult case
JAMA. 2017;318(22):2199-
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High probability of missing out micro-metastases
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5. Common approach: patch-based method
• Patch-based method requires extensive detailed annotations by
human experts (1 hour per slide)
Cancer (P)
Benign (N)
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6. The Power of Gigapixel AI:
Training AI to recognize metastasis using only
lymph node-level annotation
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7. Deep neural network trained on ~6000 gigapixel lymph node
images exhibit superior ability in recognizing micrometastasis
Micrometastasis vs Negative Lymph Nodes (n=919)
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9. Clinical impact evaluation: Better sensitivity
• The workflow significantly improved the sensitivity of micrometastasis
identification (81.94% to 95.83%, P < .001) and isolated tumor cells
(67.95% to 96.15%, P < .001)
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