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About

About

Sara Oliveira was born in Coimbra, Portugal, in 1992. She received the MSc. Degree in Biomedical Engineering from Faculty of Sciences and Technology of University of Coimbra, Portugal, in 2016. Since 2016 she has been working as a research assistant at INESC TEC, an R&D institute affiliated with the University of Porto, in the Visual Computing and Machine Intelligence Group (VCMI) and in the Breast Research Group. Until August 2018, she was a project member in a funded research project, BCCT.plan, related with the planning of Breast Conserving Treatment. Currently, she is enrolled in the Doctoral Program in Electrical and Computer Engineering, at Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto. Her research is focused on computational pathology approaches for breast, colorectal and cervical cancers diagnosis on whole slide images. Since July 2017, she is also a member of the organizing committee of VISUM (VIsion Understanding and Machine intelligence summer school). Her main research interests include computational pathology, medical image analysis, computer vision and machine (deep) learning.

Interest
Topics
Details

Details

  • Name

    Sara Isabel Oliveira
  • Role

    External Research Collaborator
  • Since

    09th November 2016
002
Publications

2023

Annotating for Artificial Intelligence Applications in Digital Pathology: A Practical Guide for Pathologists and Researchers

Authors
Montezuma, D; Oliveira, SP; Neto, PC; Oliveira, D; Monteiro, A; Cardoso, JS; Macedo-Pinto, I;

Publication
MODERN PATHOLOGY

Abstract
Training machine learning models for artificial intelligence (AI) applications in pathology often requires extensive annotation by human experts, but there is little guidance on the subject. In this work, we aimed to describe our experience and provide a simple, useful, and practical guide addressing annotation strategies for AI development in computational pathology. Annotation methodology will vary significantly depending on the specific study's objectives, but common difficulties will be present across different settings. We summarize key aspects and issue guiding principles regarding team interaction, ground-truth quality assessment, different annotation types, and available software and hardware options and address common difficulties while annotating. This guide was specifically designed for pathology annotation, intending to help pathologists, other researchers, and AI developers with this process.(c) 2022 THE AUTHORS. Published by Elsevier Inc. on behalf of the United States & Canadian Academy of Pathology. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

2023

A CAD system for automatic dysplasia grading on H&E cervical whole-slide images

Authors
Oliveira, SP; Montezuma, D; Moreira, A; Oliveira, D; Neto, PC; Monteiro, A; Monteiro, J; Ribeiro, L; Goncalves, S; Pinto, IM; Cardoso, JS;

Publication
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS

Abstract
Cervical cancer is the fourth most common female cancer worldwide and the fourth leading cause of cancer-related death in women. Nonetheless, it is also among the most successfully preventable and treatable types of cancer, provided it is early identified and properly managed. As such, the detection of pre-cancerous lesions is crucial. These lesions are detected in the squamous epithelium of the uterine cervix and are graded as low- or high-grade intraepithelial squamous lesions, known as LSIL and HSIL, respectively. Due to their complex nature, this classification can become very subjective. Therefore, the development of machine learning models, particularly directly on whole-slide images (WSI), can assist pathologists in this task. In this work, we propose a weakly-supervised methodology for grading cervical dysplasia, using different levels of training supervision, in an effort to gather a bigger dataset without the need of having all samples fully annotated. The framework comprises an epithelium segmentation step followed by a dysplasia classifier (non-neoplastic, LSIL, HSIL), making the slide assessment completely automatic, without the need for manual identification of epithelial areas. The proposed classification approach achieved a balanced accuracy of 71.07% and sensitivity of 72.18%, at the slide-level testing on 600 independent samples, which are publicly available upon reasonable request.

2022

iMIL4PATH: A Semi-Supervised Interpretable Approach for Colorectal Whole-Slide Images

Authors
Neto, PC; Oliveira, SP; Montezuma, D; Fraga, J; Monteiro, A; Ribeiro, L; Goncalves, S; Pinto, IM; Cardoso, JS;

Publication
CANCERS

Abstract
Simple Summary Nowadays, colorectal cancer is the third most incident cancer worldwide and, although it can be detected by imaging techniques, diagnosis is always based on biopsy samples. This assessment includes neoplasia grading, a subjective yet important task for pathologists. With the growing availability of digital slides, the development of robust and high-performance computer vision algorithms can help to tackle such a task. In this work, we propose an approach to automatically detect and grade lesions in colorectal biopsies with high sensitivity. The presented model attempts to support slide decision reasoning in terms of the spatial distribution of lesions, focusing the pathologist's attention on key areas. Thus, it can be integrated into clinical practice as a second opinion or as a flag for details that may have been missed at first glance. Colorectal cancer (CRC) diagnosis is based on samples obtained from biopsies, assessed in pathology laboratories. Due to population growth and ageing, as well as better screening programs, the CRC incidence rate has been increasing, leading to a higher workload for pathologists. In this sense, the application of AI for automatic CRC diagnosis, particularly on whole-slide images (WSI), is of utmost relevance, in order to assist professionals in case triage and case review. In this work, we propose an interpretable semi-supervised approach to detect lesions in colorectal biopsies with high sensitivity, based on multiple-instance learning and feature aggregation methods. The model was developed on an extended version of the recent, publicly available CRC dataset (the CRC+ dataset with 4433 WSI), using 3424 slides for training and 1009 slides for evaluation. The proposed method attained 90.19% classification ACC, 98.8% sensitivity, 85.7% specificity, and a quadratic weighted kappa of 0.888 at slide-based evaluation. Its generalisation capabilities are also studied on two publicly available external datasets.

2022

Quality Control in Digital Pathology: Automatic Fragment Detection and Counting

Authors
Albuquerque, T; Moreira, A; Barros, B; Montezuma, D; Oliveira, SP; Neto, PC; Monteiro, JC; Ribeiro, L; Gonçalves, S; Monteiro, A; Pinto, IM; Cardoso, JS;

Publication
44th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society, EMBC 2022, Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom, July 11-15, 2022

Abstract
Manual assessment of fragments during the pro-cessing of pathology specimens is critical to ensure that the material available for slide analysis matches that captured during grossing without losing valuable material during this process. However, this step is still performed manually, resulting in lost time and delays in making the complete case available for evaluation by the pathologist. To overcome this limitation, we developed an autonomous system that can detect and count the number of fragments contained on each slide. We applied and compared two different methods: conventional machine learning methods and deep convolutional network methods. For conventional machine learning methods, we tested a two-stage approach with a supervised classifier followed by unsupervised hierarchical clustering. In addition, Fast R-CNN and YOLOv5, two state-of-the-art deep learning models for detection, were used and compared. All experiments were performed on a dataset comprising 1276 images of colorec-tal biopsy and polypectomy specimens manually labeled for fragment/set detection. The best results were obtained with the YOLOv5 architecture with a map@0.5 of 0.977 for fragment/set detection.

2021

CAD systems for colorectal cancer from WSI are still not ready for clinical acceptance

Authors
Oliveira, SP; Neto, PC; Fraga, J; Montezuma, D; Monteiro, A; Monteiro, J; Ribeiro, L; Goncalves, S; Pinto, IM; Cardoso, JS;

Publication
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS

Abstract
Most oncological cases can be detected by imaging techniques, but diagnosis is based on pathological assessment of tissue samples. In recent years, the pathology field has evolved to a digital era where tissue samples are digitised and evaluated on screen. As a result, digital pathology opened up many research opportunities, allowing the development of more advanced image processing techniques, as well as artificial intelligence (AI) methodologies. Nevertheless, despite colorectal cancer (CRC) being the second deadliest cancer type worldwide, with increasing incidence rates, the application of AI for CRC diagnosis, particularly on whole-slide images (WSI), is still a young field. In this review, we analyse some relevant works published on this particular task and highlight the limitations that hinder the application of these works in clinical practice. We also empirically investigate the feasibility of using weakly annotated datasets to support the development of computer-aided diagnosis systems for CRC from WSI. Our study underscores the need for large datasets in this field and the use of an appropriate learning methodology to gain the most benefit from partially annotated datasets. The CRC WSI dataset used in this study, containing 1,133 colorectal biopsy and polypectomy samples, is available upon reasonable request.

Supervised
thesis

2018

Design of a software system for processes improvement in a technology start-up

Author
Joana Raquel da Silva Rodrigues

Institution
UP-FEUP