Large-Scale Dermatopathology Dataset for Lesion Segmentation: Model Development and Analysis

Background: With the increasing incidence of skin cancer, the workload for pathologists has surged. The diagnosis of skin samples, especially for complex lesions such as malignant melanomas and melanocytic lesions, has shown higher diagnostic variability compared to other organ samples. Consequently, artificial intelligence (AI)-based diagnostic assistance programs are increasingly needed to support dermatopathologists in achieving more consistent diagnoses. However, large-scale skin pathology image datasets for AI learning are often insufficient or limited to specific diseases. This study aimed to build and assess a large-scale dermatopathology image dataset for an AI model. Methods: We trained and evaluated a lesion segmentation model based on this dataset, which consisted of over 34,376 histopathology slide images collected from four institutions, including normal skin and six types of common skin lesion: epidermal cysts, seborrheic keratosis, Bowen disease/squamous cell carcinoma, basal cell carcinoma, melanocytic nevus, and malignant melanoma. Each image was accompanied by labeled data consisting of lesion area annotations and clinical information. To ensure the high quality and accuracy of the dataset, we employed data quality management methods, including syntactic accuracy, semantic accuracy, statistical diversity, and validity evaluation. Results: The results of the dataset quality assessment confirmed high quality, with syntactic accuracy and semantic accuracy at 0.99 and 0.95, respectively. Statistical diversity was verified to follow a natural distribution. The validity evaluation verified the strong performance of the segmentation model for each group of data, with a Dice score ranging from 80% to 91%. Conclusion: The results demonstrated that our constructed dataset provides a well-suited resource for deep learning training, offering a large-scale multi-institutional dermatopathology dataset that can drive advancements in AI-driven dermatopathology diagnosis.