A Deep Learning AI Model for Histopathological Diagnosis and Grading of Mucoepidermoid Carcinoma of Salivary Glands (Diagnostic Accuracy Study)

PURPOSE: This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of deep learning AI model in the diagnosis and grading of mucoepidermoid carcinoma. METHODS: We developed a multiple instance learning based-deep learning model which consisted of two modules. One to perform slide-level classification of whole slide images into mucoepidermoid carcinoma and non-mucoepidermoid carcinoma classes and the second one to perform grading into low, intermediate, and high grades. A total of 194 whole slide images were included in the study. Of these, 92 corresponded to mucoepidermoid carcinoma, while the remaining 102 represented non-mucoepidermoid carcinoma cases. RESULTS: Our results showed that the classification model achieved 90.62% accuracy, 90.62% macro F1 score, 90.60% weighted F1 score, 91.67% macro precision, 91.18% macro recall. The grading model achieved an accuracy of 73.3%, weighted F1-score of 73.9%, weighted precision of 76.1% and weighted recall of 73.3%. CONCLUSION: The proposed deep learning classification model achieved promising performance in differentiating mucoepidermoid carcinoma cases. However, the grading model achieved an overall accuracy of 73.3%. Thus, depending on AI solely is still questionable, however it can be used to augment the work of the pathologist.