Design of a System and Method for Optimal selection of Tumor Slice using Linear Ultrasound Imaging for Histopathology.

In excision biopsy, a tumor mass is surgically removed from the body. Subsequently, it is sliced at an appropriate location and investigated microscopically through a process called histopathology. Any bias in tumor slicing severely influences histopathology outcomes, such as if malignant foci do not appear in the sliced location, then, the tumor would be accidentally reported non-malignant. The standard approach adopted to solve this challenge by a histopathologist is to overcome this bias by slicing at multiple locations for their investigation. Till now, this process has been manual, time-consuming, and error-prone. We aim to design a system and develop a data-driven deep learning approach to assist histopathologists by providing them with a representative slice location for reporting to increase their efficiency and accuracy. We have developed a low cost linear gantry scanner that can acquire images and integrated with a deep learning model to predict the optimal slice representative of pathology in a tumor mass. We achieve an F1 score of 0.97 and an accuracy of 97.5% in predicting an optimal slice using this approach.