An Overview of Existing Applications of Artificial Intelligence in Histopathological Diagnostics of Lymphoma: A Scoping Review

Background: Artificial intelligence (AI) shows promising results in lymphoma detection, prediction, and classification. However, translating these findings into practice requires a rigorous assessment of potential biases, clinical utility, and further validation of research models. Objective: The goal of this study was to summarize existing studies on artificial intelligence models for the histopathological detection of lymphoma. Design: This study adhered to the PRISMA Extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) guidelines. A systematic search was conducted across three major databases (Scopus, PubMed, Web of Science) for English-language articles and reviews published between 2016 and 2025. Seven precise search queries were applied to identify relevant publications, accounting for variations in study modality, algorithmic architectures, and disease-specific terminology. Results: The search identified 612 records, of which 36 articles met the inclusion criteria. These studies presented 36 AI models, comprising 30 diagnostic and six prognostic applications, with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) being the predominant architecture. Regarding data sources, 83% (30/36) of datasets utilized Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E)-stained images, while the remainder relied on diverse modalities, including IHC-stained slides, bone marrow smears, and other tissue preparations. Studies predominantly utilized retrospective, private cohorts with sample sizes typically ranging from 50 to 400 patients; only a minority leveraged open-access repositories (e.g., Kaggle, TCGA). The primary application was slide-level multi-class classification, distinguishing between specific lymphoma subtypes and non-neoplastic controls. Beyond diagnosis, a subset of studies explored advanced prognostic tasks, such as predicting chemotherapy response and disease progression (e.g., in CLL), as well as automated biomarker quantification (c-MYC, BCL2, PD-L1). Reported diagnostic performance was generally high, with accuracy ranging from 60% to 100% (clustering around 90%) and AUC values spanning 0.70 to 0.99 (predominantly > 0.90). Conclusions: While AI models demonstrate high diagnostic accuracy, their translation into practice is limited by unstandardized protocols, morphological complexity, and the “black box” nature of algorithms. Critical issues regarding data provenance, image noise, and lack of representativeness raise risks of systematic bias, hence the need for rigorous validation in diverse clinical environments.