Development and Prospective Validation of a Digital Pathology-based Artificial Intelligence Diagnostic Model for Pan-cancer Lymphatic Metastasis

Lymph node metastasis (LNM) is a common mode of cancer metastasis, and accurate postoperative pathological lymph node staging is of great significance for further treatment and prognosis assessment. However, the current pathological evaluation of lymph nodes relies on manual examination by pathologists, which has a relatively low diagnostic efficiency and is prone to missed-diagnosis for micro metastatic lesions.

Therefore, investigators are to develope an artificial intelligence (AI)-based diagnostic model for detecting pathological cancer lymph node metastasis based on deep learning algorithms, and evaluate its apllication value in the real-world clinical settings.

This study is a diagnostic test with no intervention measures, planning to collect pathological slides of formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded lymph nodes resected from the enrolled patients and digitise them into whole-slide images (WSIs). The AI model will analyse the WSIs and generate pixel-level heatmaps and slide-level diagnostic results (with or without LNM). The routine pathological examination will be performed as usual. These two processes will not interfere with each other. And if there are inconsistency in slide-level classification between AI and routine pathological examination, investigators would convene senior pathologists for discussion to make the final decision (immunohistochemistry would be performed if necessary). The final result will be presented to the patient in the form of a pathological report.