Digital Histopathology

Subject – Science and Tech

Context – AI tool to simplify identification of cancerous tissue in tumours

Concept –

Indian Institute of Technology Madras researchers use a combination of deep learning techniques and traditional machine learning to develop a tool that can diagnose cancer by looking at whole slide images of the tumour.
The tool has been tested on datasets of breast, liver and colon cancer tissue images.
It is economical in terms of the time required to process the images and analyse them.
Traditionally, histopathologists slice the tumour tissue into approximately 20-micron-thick slices which they put on slides.
- They look at enlarged images of the slides and go over it cell by cell to manually classify it as cancerous or otherwise.
- This is highly time-consuming, and it is to alleviate this burden that digital histopathology developed.
In this, after preparing the slides, the entire slide is scanned using a high-resolution microscope and digitised. This is then analysed using computerised tools.