Enhance diagnostic accuracy with AI-driven PD-L1 analysis
PD-L1 is a critical biomarker to guide immunotherapies in lung cancer care, and even minor differences in the analysis of PD-L1 expression can drastically alter treatment plans. Currently, PD-L1 is scored by a pathologist by visual estimation (“eyeballing”), which provides high accuracy in clear-cut cases. Still, it introduces variability of results in the middle ranges of PD-L1 expression with potentially drastic effects in the patient care: Being off by even 5 or 10 percentage points can shift a patient’s treatment regime entirely; under-calling can deny patients effective immunotherapy, while over-calling can lead to unnecessary treatment.
AI assistance brings consistency and efficiency to the PD-L1 scoring: AI algorithms apply the same criteria to every slide, aiming for objective reproducibility. AI can examine every tumor cell across the whole slide (hundreds or thousands), and once trained, AI can score PD-L1 in minutes, accelerating turnaround and freeing pathologists from tedious counting.