Cell projection plots: a novel visualization of bone marrow aspirate cytology

Abstract

Deep models for cell detection have demonstrated utility in bone marrow cytology, showing impressive results in terms of accuracy and computational efficiency. However, these models have yet to be implemented in the clinical diagnostic workflow. Additionally, the metrics used to evaluate cell detection models are not necessarily aligned with clinical goals and targets. In order to address these issues, we introduce cell projection plots (CPPs), which are novel, automatically generated visual summaries of bone marrow aspirate specimens. CPPs provide a compact summary of bone marrow aspirate cytology, and encompass relevant biological patterns such as neutrophil maturation. To gauge clinical relevance, CPPs were shown to three hematopathologists, who decided whether shown diagnostic synopses matched with generated CPPs. Pathologists were able to match CPPs to the correct synopsis with 85% accuracy. Our finding suggests CPPs can compactly represent clinically relevant information from bone marrow aspirate specimens, and may be used to efficiently summarize bone marrow cytology to pathologists. CPP could be a step toward human-centered implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) in hematopathology, and a basis for a diagnostic support tool for digital pathology workflows.