Comparative performance of <scp>PD</scp>‐<scp>L1</scp> scoring by pathologists and <scp>AI</scp> algorithms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AIM: This study evaluates the comparative effectiveness of pathologists versus artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms in scoring PD-L1 expression in non-small cell lung carcinoma (NSCLC). Immune-checkpoint inhibitors have revolutionized NSCLC treatment, with PD-L1 expression, measured as the tumour proportion score (TPS), serving as a critical predictive biomarker for therapeutic response. METHODS AND RESULTS: In our analysis, 51 SP263-stained NSCLC cases were scored by six pathologists using light microscopy and whole-slide images (WSI), alongside evaluations by two commercially available software tools: uPath software (Roche) and the PD-L1 Lung Cancer TME application (Visiopharm). The study examined intra- and interobserver agreement among pathologists at TPS cutoffs of 1% and 50%, revealing moderate interobserver agreement (Fleiss' kappa 0.558) for TPS <1% and almost perfect agreement (Fleiss' kappa 0.873) for TPS ≥50%. Intraobserver consistency was high, with Cohen's kappa ranging from 0.726 to 1.0. Comparisons between the AI algorithms and the median pathologist scores showed fair agreement for uPath (Fleiss' kappa 0.354) and substantial agreement for the Visiopharm application (Fleiss' kappa 0.672) at the 50% TPS cutoff. CONCLUSION: These results indicate that while there is strong interobserver concordance among pathologists at higher TPS levels, the performance of AI algorithms is less consistent. The study underscores the need for further refinement of AI tools to match the reliability of expert human evaluation, particularly in critical clinical decision-making contexts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".