How different are Cats vs. Cells in Histopathology?
An awesome question stated in an article by Michael BEREKET and Thao NGUYEN (Febuary 7, 2018) brings it straight to the point: Deep learning has revolutionized the field of computer vision. So why are pathologists still spending their time looking at cells through microscopes?
The most famous machine learning experiments have been done with recognizing cats (see the video by Peter Norvig) – and the question is relevant, how different are these cats from the cells in histopathology?
Machine Learning, and in particular deep learning, has reached a human-level in certain tasks, particularly in image classification. Interestingly, in the field of pathology these methods are not so ubiqutiously used currently. A valid question indeed is: Why do human pathologists spend so much time with visual inspection? Of course we restrict this debate on routine tasks!
This excellent article is worthwhile giving a read:
Stanford AI for healthcare: How different are cats from cells
Source of the animated gif above:
https://giphy.com/gifs/microscope-fluorescence-mitosis-2G5llPaffwvio
