title: Mitotic figure recognition: agreement among pathologists and computerized detector.
abstract: Despite the prognostic importance of mitotic count as one of the components of the Bloom-Richardson grade, several studies have found that pathologists' agreement on the mitotic grade is fairly modest. Collecting a set of more than 4,200 candidate mitotic figures, we evaluate pathologists' agreement on individual figures, and train a computerized system for mitosis detection, comparing its performance to the classifications of three pathologists. The system's and the pathologists' classifications are based on evaluation of digital micrographs of hematoxylin and eosin stained breast tissue. On figures where the majority of pathologists agree on a classification, we compare the performance of the trained system to that of the individual pathologists. We find that the level of agreement of the pathologists ranges from slight to moderate, with strong biases, and that the system performs competitively in rating the ground truth set. This study is a step towards automatic mitosis count to accelerate a pathologist's work and improve reproducibility.
authors.affiliation: Department of Machine Learning, NEC Laboratories America, NJ 08540, USA. malon@nec-labs.com
authors.forename: Christopher
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Malon
authors.forename: Elena
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Brachtel
authors.forename: Eric
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Cosatto
authors.forename: Hans Peter
authors.initials: HP
authors.lastname: Graf
authors.forename: Atsushi
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Kurata
authors.forename: Masahiko
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kuroda
authors.forename: John S
authors.initials: JS
authors.lastname: Meyer
authors.forename: Akira
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Saito
authors.forename: Shulin
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.forename: Yukako
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Yagi
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D001331:Automation; D001943:Breast Neoplasms / Q000145:classification; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D008938:Mitosis; D008940:Mitotic Index; D060787:Neoplasm Grading / Q000379:methods*; D010338:Pathology, Clinical / Q000379:methods*; D010820:Physicians; D015203:Reproducibility of Results