Overcoming Limitations in Artificial Intelligence-based Prostate Cancer Detection through Better Datasets and a Bayesian Approach to Aggregate Panel Predictions

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Bayesian framework to improve AI-based prostate cancer detection by integrating new data and presenting predictions as annotation panels, supported by a high-quality dataset and uncertainty modeling.

Contribution

It presents a novel Bayesian approach for aggregating panel predictions and introduces a curated dataset for prostate histopathology analysis.

Findings

Bayesian integration improves model robustness and error mitigation.

Panel-based annotations aid pathologists in accurate grading.

Uncertainty modeling highlights areas of interest for clinical review.

Abstract

Despite considerable progress in developing artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms for prostate cancer detection from whole slide images, the clinical applicability of these models remains limited due to variability in pathological annotations and existing dataset limitations. This article proposes a novel approach to overcome these challenges by leveraging a Bayesian framework to seamlessly integrate new data, and present results as a panel of annotations. The framework is demonstrated by integrating a Bayesian prior with one trained AI model to generate a distribution of Gleason patterns for each pixel of an image. It is shown that using this distribution of Gleason patterns rather than a ground-truth label can improve model applicability, mitigate errors, and highlight areas of interest for pathologists. Additionally, we present a high-quality, hand-curated dataset of prostate histopathological images annotated at the gland level by trained pre-medical students and verified by an expert pathologist. We highlight the potential of this adaptive and uncertainty-aware framework for developing clinically deployable AI tools that can support pathologists in accurate prostate cancer grading, improve diagnostic accuracy, and create positive patient outcomes.