A Review on the Applications of Crowdsourcing in Human Pathology

TL;DR

This paper reviews the diverse applications of crowdsourcing in human pathology, highlighting a semi-systematic approach to literature collection and exploring crowdsourcing's role in research, diagnosis, and screening processes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel semi-systematic method for literature review and demonstrates crowdsourcing's utility in screening and analyzing pathology research articles.

Findings

Crowdsourcing has been widely applied in pathology research and diagnosis.

A semi-systematic review method effectively identifies relevant literature.

Crowdsourcing can assist in screening and analyzing pathology data.

Abstract

The advent of the digital pathology has introduced new avenues of diagnostic medicine. Among them, crowdsourcing has attracted researchers' attention in the recent years, allowing them to engage thousands of untrained individuals in research and diagnosis. While there exist several articles in this regard, prior works have not collectively documented them. We, therefore, aim to review the applications of crowdsourcing in human pathology in a semi-systematic manner. We firstly, introduce a novel method to do a systematic search of the literature. Utilizing this method, we, then, collect hundreds of articles and screen them against a pre-defined set of criteria. Furthermore, we crowdsource part of the screening process, to examine another potential application of crowdsourcing. Finally, we review the selected articles and characterize the prior uses of crowdsourcing in pathology.