Multimodal Generative AI for Anatomic Pathology—A Review of Current Applications to Envisage the Future Direction

This review focuses on the purported applications of multimodal Gen-AI models for anatomic pathology image analysis and interpretation to predict future directions. A scoping review was conducted to explore the applications of multimodal Gen-AI models in advancing histopathology image analysis. A comprehensive search was conducted using electronic databases for relevant articles published within the past year (July 1, 2023 to June 30, 2024). The selected articles were critically analyzed to identify and summarize the applications of multimodal Gen-AI in anatomic pathology image analysis. Multimodal Gen AI models reported in the literature claim moderate to high accuracy on tasks including image classification, segmentation, and text-to-image retrieval. This review demonstrates the potential of multimodal Gen AI models for useful applications in pathology, including assisting with diagnoses, generating data for education and research, and detection of molecular features from anatomic pathology images. These models use data from a few academic institutions thus they require validation on diverse real-world data. There is an urgent need to build consensus models for optimal model performance through multicenter collaboration using a federated learning approach and the use of carefully curated synthetic anatomic pathology data. These models also need to achieve reliability, generalizability and meet the standards required for clinical use. Despite the rigorous need for evaluation and the need to address genuine concerns, multimodal GenAI models present a promising perspective for the advancement and scalability of anatomic pathology.