HistoColAi: An Open-Source Web Platform for Collaborative Digital Histology Image Annotation with AI-Driven Predictive Integration

Abstract: Digital pathology has become a standard in the pathology workflow due to its many benefits. These include the level of detail of the whole slide images generated and the potential immediate sharing of cases between hospitals. Recent advances in deep learning-based methods for image analysis make them of potential aid in digital pathology. However, a major limitation in developing computer-aided diagnostic systems for pathology is the lack of an intuitive and open web application for data annotation. This paper proposes a web service that efficiently provides a tool to visualize and annotate digitized histological images. In addition, to show and validate the tool, in this paper we include a use case centered on the diagnosis of spindle cell skin neoplasm for multiple annotators. A usability study of the tool is also presented, showing the feasibility of the developed tool.