Deep Learning Approach to Classify Cutaneous Melanoma in a Whole Slide Image

Abstract

Although the histopathological diagnosis of cutaneous melanocytic lesions is fairly accurate and reliable among experienced surgical pathologists, it is not perfect in every case (especially melanoma). Microscopic examination–clinicopathological correlation is the gold standard for the definitive diagnosis of melanoma. Pathologists may encounter diagnostic controversies when melanoma closely mimics Spitz’s nevus or blue nevus, exhibits amelanotic histopathology, or is in situ. It would be beneficial if diagnosing cutaneous melanocytic lesions can be automated by using deep learning, particularly when assisting surgical pathologists with their workloads. In this preliminary study, we investigated the application of deep learning for classifying cutaneous melanoma in whole-slide images (WSIs). We trained models via weakly supervised learning using a dataset of 66 WSIs (33 melanomas and 33 non-melanomas). We evaluated the models on a test set of 90 WSIs (40 melanomas and 50 non-melanomas), achieving ROC–AUC at 0.821 for the WSI level and 0.936 for the tile level by the best model.