The key to an effective AI-powered digital pathology: Establishing a symbiotic workflow between pathologists and machine

Abstract

Pathology is a fundamental element of modern medicine that determines the final diagnosis of medical conditions, leads medical decisions, and portrays the prognosis. Due to continuous improvements in AI capabilities (e.g., object recognition and image processing), intelligent systems are bound to play a key role in augmenting pathology research and clinical practices. Despite the pervasive deployment of computational approaches in similar fields such as radiology, there has been less success in integrating AI in clinical practices and histopathological diagnosis. This is partly due to the opacity of end-to-end AI systems, which raises issues of interoperability and accountability of medical practices. In this article, we draw on interactive machine learning to take advantage of AI in digital pathology to open the black box of AI and generate a more effective partnership between pathologists and AI systems based on the metaphors of parameterization and implicitization.