Cross-organ Deployment of EOS Detection AI without Retraining: Feasibility and Limitation
It addresses the labor-intensive diagnosis of eosinophilic chronic rhinosinusitis by exploring cross-organ AI deployment, though it is incremental as it adapts an existing model without retraining.
This study investigated whether an AI model trained on gastrointestinal data could segment eosinophils in nasal tissue images without retraining, finding promising but variable accuracy across cases.
Chronic rhinosinusitis (CRS) is characterized by persistent inflammation in the paranasal sinuses, leading to typical symptoms of nasal congestion, facial pressure, olfactory dysfunction, and discolored nasal drainage, which can significantly impact quality-of-life. Eosinophils (Eos), a crucial component in the mucosal immune response, have been linked to disease severity in CRS. The diagnosis of eosinophilic CRS typically uses a threshold of 10-20 eos per high-power field (HPF). However, manually counting Eos in histological samples is laborious and time-intensive, making the use of AI-driven methods for automated evaluations highly desirable. Interestingly, eosinophils are predominantly located in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract, which has prompted the release of numerous deep learning models trained on GI data. This study leverages a CircleSnake model initially trained on upper-GI data to segment Eos cells in whole slide images (WSIs) of nasal tissues. It aims to determine the extent to which Eos segmentation models developed for the GI tract can be adapted to nasal applications without retraining. The experimental results show promising accuracy in some WSIs, although, unsurprisingly, the performance varies across cases. This paper details these performance outcomes, delves into the reasons for such variations, and aims to provide insights that could guide future development of deep learning models for eosinophilic CRS.