Image-based Lung Analysis in the Context of Digital Pathology: a Brief Review.

Lung cancer is the 2^nd most diagnosed cancer worldwide. The corresponding histopathological analysis, being both costly and time-consuming, demands the commitment of skilled professionals who, while engrossed in this task, experience constraints on their ability to attend to other crucial responsibilities. Moreover, as it is a human-driven process, mistakes may lead to incorrect diagnosis and treatment. Given the disease frequency and mortality, automated diagnostic systems, using Artificial Intelligence (AI), represent valuable improvements in diagnostic timing and overall performance. Recently, Deep Learning (DL) has been widely used for extracting features from histopathologic images approaching more accurate and expeditious analysis. With this line of research in mind, a brief review of recent technical/scientific works within the scope of lung Digital Pathology (DP) image analysis is provided in this paper, covering different computer vision tasks including classification, segmentation, and detection. Furthermore, available datasets and open-source annotation tools capable of providing support to the aforementioned DP-related tasks are also overviewed. Afterward, a summary table and a discussion around the reviewed approaches is provided, consolidating critical information such as technique/DL architecture, involved datasets, metrics, etc. From this study, it was observed that the ARA-CNN technique achieved the highest Area Under the Curve (AUC) ranging from 0.72 to 0.99 for classification. On the other hand, the multimodal-based approach, with an AUC of 0.95, performed better for the segmentation task. As for the detection task, the BCNN approach stood out, achieving a high AUC of 0.988. This review work aims to provide a comprehensive overview of recent advancements in lung DP image analysis and serves as a foundation for future research in this critical area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]