Artificial Intelligence-Assisted Daily Quality Control System for the Histologic Diagnosis of Gastrointestinal Endoscopic Biopsies: A 1-Year Experience.

Abstract

Context.—: Seegene Medical Foundation, one of the major clinical laboratories in South Korea, developed SeeDP, an artificial intelligence (AI)-based postanalytic daily quality control (QC) system that reassesses all gastrointestinal (GI) endoscopic biopsy (EB) slides for incorrect diagnoses.

Objective.—: To review the operational records and clinical impact of SeeDP since its launch in March 2022.

Design.—: Operational records of SeeDP were retrieved for the period of March 1, 2022, to February 28, 2023. Among cases scanned during 40 working days (March 10, 2022, to May 4, 2022), all discordant cases encountered by 2 pathologists were reviewed. Cases of SeeDP-assisted revised diagnoses were collected and compared with cases recognized using conventional methods.

Results.—: Occasional scanner failures and various types of aberrant errors compromised QC coverage, resulting in the scanning of only 67.7% (572 254 of 844 906) of all EB slides submitted and 0.8% of the scanned slides being further excluded from the AI analysis. The AI predictions differed from the pathologists' diagnoses in 42 760 of the 557 672 gastrointestinal EB slides (7.7%) successfully assessed by the AI models; however, a detailed review of discordant slides revealed that true misdiagnosis accounted for only 5.5% (25 of 454) of the disagreements. Compared with conventional error recognition methods, SeeDP detected more misdiagnoses (7 versus 14) within a significantly shorter time (average, 3.6 versus 38.7 days; P < .001), including 1 signet ring cell carcinoma initially diagnosed as gastritis.

Conclusions.—: AI-based daily QC systems are plausible solutions to guarantee high-quality pathologic diagnosis by enabling rapid detection and correction of misdiagnosis.