Tracing Diagnosis Paths on Histopathology WSIs for Diagnostically Relevant Case Recommendation

Telepathology has enabled the remote cancer diagnosis based on digital pathological whole slide images (WSIs). During the diagnosis, the behavior information of the pathologist can be recorded by the platform and then archived with the digital cases. The diagnosis path of the pathologist on a WSI is valuable information since the image content within the path is highly correlated with the diagnosis report of the pathologist. In this paper, we proposed a novel diagnosis path network (DPathNet). DPathNet utilizes the diagnosis paths of pathologists on the WSIs as the supervision to learn the pathology knowledge from the image content. Based on the DPathNet, we develop a novel approach for computer-aided cancer diagnosis named session-based histopathology image recommendation (SHIR). SHIR summaries the information of a WSI while the pathologist browsing the WSI and actively recommends the relevant cases within similar image content from the database. The proposed approaches are evaluated on a gastric dataset containing 983 cases within 5 categories of gastric lesions. The experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of the DPathNet to the SHIR task and the supervision of the diagnosis path is sufficient to train the DPathNet. The MRR and MAP of the proposed SHIR framework are respectively 0.741 and 0.777 on the gastric dataset.