The impact of tissue detection on diagnostic artificial intelligence algorithms in digital pathology

Sol Erika Boman; Nita Mulliqi; Anders Blilie; Xiaoyi Ji; Kelvin Szolnoky; Einar Gudlaugsson; Emiel A. M. Janssen; Svein R. Kjosavik; José Asenjo; Marcello Gambacorta; Paolo Libretti; Marcin Braun; Radzislaw Kordek; Roman Łowicki; Kristina Hotakainen; Päivi Väre; Bodil Ginnerup Pedersen; Karina Dalsgaard Sørensen; Benedicte Parm Ulhøi; Lars Egevad; Kimmo Kartasalo

arXiv · 2503.23021

The impact of tissue detection on diagnostic artificial intelligence algorithms in digital pathology

View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Tissue detection is a crucial first step in most digital pathology applications. Details of the segmentation algorithm are rarely reported, and there is a lack of studies investigating the downstream effects of a poor segmentation algorithm. Disregarding tissue detection quality could create a bottleneck for downstream performance and jeopardize patient safety if diagnostically relevant parts of the specimen are excluded from analysis in clinical applications. This study aims to determine whether performance of downstream tasks is sensitive to the tissue detection method, and to compare performance of classical and AI-based tissue detection. To this end, we trained an AI model for Gleason grading of prostate cancer in whole slide images (WSIs) using two different tissue detection algorithms: thresholding (classical) and UNet++ (AI). A total of 33,823 WSIs scanned on five digital pathology scanners were used to train the tissue detection AI model. The downstream Gleason grading algorithm was trained and tested using 70,524 WSIs from 13 clinical sites scanned on 13 different scanners. There was a decrease from 116 (0.43%) to 22 (0.08%) fully undetected tissue samples when switching from thresholding-based tissue detection to AI-based, suggesting an AI model may be more reliable than a classical model for avoiding total failures on slides with unusual appearance. On the slides where tissue could be detected by both algorithms, no significant difference in overall Gleason grading performance was observed. However, tissue detection dependent clinically significant variations in AI grading were observed in 3.5% of malignant slides, highlighting the importance of robust tissue detection for optimal clinical performance of diagnostic AI.

Explore related subjects

cs.CV

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeX RIS

Sol Erika Boman, Nita Mulliqi, Anders Blilie, Xiaoyi Ji, Kelvin Szolnoky, Einar Gudlaugsson, Emiel A. M. Janssen, Svein R. Kjosavik, José Asenjo, Marcello Gambacorta, Paolo Libretti, Marcin Braun, Radzislaw Kordek, Roman Łowicki, Kristina Hotakainen, Päivi Väre, Bodil Ginnerup Pedersen, Karina Dalsgaard Sørensen, Benedicte Parm Ulhøi, Lars Egevad, Kimmo Kartasalo. 2025-03-29. The impact of tissue detection on diagnostic artificial intelligence algorithms in digital pathology. https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23021

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Tackling fluffy clouds: robust agricultural field boundary delineation from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 satellite image time series

Accurate delineation of agricultural field boundaries is essential for effective crop monitoring and resource management. However, competing methodologies often face significant challenges, particularly in their reliance on extensive manual efforts for cloud-free data curation and limited adaptability to diverse global conditions. In this paper, we introduce PTAViT3D, a deep learning architecture specifically designed for processing three-dimensional time series of satellite imagery from either Sentinel-1 (S1) or Sentinel-2 (S2). Additionally, we present PTAViT3D-CA, an extension of the PTAViT3D model incorporating cross-attention mechanisms to fuse S1 and S2 datasets, enhancing robustness in cloud-contaminated scenarios. The proposed methods leverage spatio-temporal correlations through a memory-efficient 3D Vision Transformer architecture, facilitating accurate boundary delineation directly from preprocessed, cloud-affected imagery. We comprehensively validate our models through extensive testing on various datasets, including Australia's ePaddocks - CSIRO's national, continental-scale agricultural field boundary product covering Australia's cropping regions - alongside public benchmarks Fields-of-the-World, PASTIS, and AI4SmallFarms. Our results consistently demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, highlighting excellent global transferability and robustness. Crucially, our approach significantly simplifies data preparation workflows by reliably processing cloud-affected imagery, thereby offering strong adaptability across diverse agricultural environments. Our code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/feevos/tfcl.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Copy-Move Forgery Detection and Question Answering for Remote Sensing Image

Driven by practical demands in land resource monitoring and national defense security, this paper introduces the Remote Sensing Copy-Move Question Answering (RSCMQA) task. Unlike traditional Remote Sensing Visual Question Answering (RSVQA), RSCMQA focuses on interpreting complex tampering scenarios and inferring relationships between objects. We present a suite of global RSCMQA datasets, comprising images from 29 different regions across 14 countries. Specifically, we propose five distinct datasets, including the basic dataset RS-CMQA, the category-balanced dataset RS-CMQA-B, the high-authenticity dataset Real-RSCM, the extended dataset RS-TQA, and the extended category-balanced dataset RS-TQA-B. These datasets fill a critical gap in the field while ensuring comprehensiveness, balance, and challenging scenarios. Furthermore, we introduce a region-discrimination-guided multimodal copy-move forgery perception framework (CMFPF), which enhances the accuracy of answering questions about tampered images by leveraging prompts about the differences and connections between the source and tampered regions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method establishes a stronger benchmark for RSCMQA compared to general VQA and RSVQA models. Our datasets and code are publicly available at https://github.com/shenyedepisa/RSCMQA.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

SMDDFNet: State-space Modeling and Dynamic Dual Fusion Network for Traffic Sign Detection

Traffic sign detection is a challenging visual signal processing task for advanced driver assistance, where small objects, scale variation, and occlusion limit conventional detectors with fixed receptive fields. This paper proposes State-space Modeling and Dynamic Dual Fusion Network (SMDDFNet), a deep learning detector for traffic sign images. SMDDFNet integrates a Dynamic Dual Fusion (DDF) module and a state-space modeling backbone to enhance multi-scale feature representation. DDF combines efficient multi-scale attention with content-aware dynamic filtering in the frequency domain, while the backbone captures long-range dependencies with linear computational complexity. A multi-scale feature fusion neck further aggregates pyramid features for robust localization of small signs. Experiments on TT100K, GTSDB, PASCAL VOC, and the Roboflow~100 \emph{vehicle} subset show that SMDDFNet achieves competitive accuracy against recent detectors while retaining real-time throughput. The source code is available at https://github.com/rainbowyuyu/SMDDFNet

cs.CV↗