Artificial intelligence-based triaging of cutaneous melanocytic lesions

Pathologists are facing an increasing workload due to a growing volume of cases and the need for more comprehensive diagnoses. Aiming to facilitate workload reduction and faster turnaround times, we developed an artificial intelligence (AI) model for triaging cutaneous melanocytic lesions based on whole slide images. The AI model was developed and validated using a retrospective cohort from the University Medical Center Utrecht, the Netherlands. The dataset consisted of 52,202 whole slide images from 27,167 unique specimens, acquired from 20,707 patients. Specimens with only benign common nevi, also known as moles, were assigned to the low complexity category (86.6%). In contrast, specimens with any other melanocytic lesion subtype, including non-common nevi, melanocytomas, and melanomas, were assigned to the high complexity category (13.4%). The dataset was split on patient level into a development set (80%) and test sets (20%) for independent evaluation. Predictive performance was primarily measured using the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) and the area under the precision–recall curve (AUPRC). A simulation experiment was performed to study the effect of implementing AI-based triaging in the clinic. The AI model reached an AUROC of 0.966 (95% CI, 0.960–0.972) and an AUPRC of 0.857 (95% CI, 0.836–0.877) on the in-distribution test set, and an AUROC of 0.899 (95% CI, 0.860–0.934) and an AUPRC of 0.498 (95% CI, 0.360–0.639) on the out-of-distribution test set. In the simulation experiment, using random case assignment as baseline, AI-based triaging prevented an average of 43.9 (95% CI, 36–55) initial examinations of high complexity cases by general pathologists for every 500 cases. In conclusion, the AI model achieved a strong predictive performance in differentiating between cutaneous melanocytic lesions of high and low complexity. The improvement in workflow efficiency due to AI-based triaging could be substantial.