A visual coding system in histopathology and its consensual acquisition.
Divergent descriptions of histopathologic images induce inter- and intra-observer variability in diagnosis. Even though a controlled terminology exists to describe medical imaging, pathologists do not always agree on the visual representation of the descriptive terms. The main purpose of our work is to define a methodology to build a standardized visual coding system unambiguously characterizing the terms of a microglossary. The methodology follows two steps: 1) the acquisition of experts' descriptions of images using the microglossary and 2) a consensus derivation. The procedure was applied on a set of 85 histopathological images of breast tumors described by two experts. Among the 339 objects selected in images, 176 were detected by both experts, 77% localized at the same place and 25% also identically labeled. The microglossary was enriched and illustrated via the resulting consensual descriptions. The contribution of this work supports relevant indexing of biomedical images and image-related information.
Le Bozec
C
C
Medical Informatics Department, Broussais Hospital, Paris, France. lebozec@hbroussais.fr
Jaulent
M C
MC
Zapletal
E
E
Heudes
D
D
Degoulet
P
P
D001943:Breast Neoplasms / Q000473:pathology; D006653:Histology / Q000145:classification; D006801:Humans; D015588:Observer Variation; D010338:Pathology, Clinical / Q000145:classification*; D012984:Software; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled