A review of machine learning approaches, challenges and prospects for computational tumor pathology

Computational pathology is part of precision oncology medicine. The integration of high-throughput data including genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, pathomics, and radiomics into clinical practice improves cancer treatment plans, treatment cycles, and cure rates, and helps doctors open up innovative approaches to patient prognosis. In the past decade, rapid advances in artificial intelligence, chip design and manufacturing, and mobile computing have facilitated research in computational pathology and have the potential to provide better-integrated solutions for whole-slide images, multi-omics data, and clinical informatics. However, tumor computational pathology now brings some challenges to the application of tumour screening, diagnosis and prognosis in terms of data integration, hardware processing, network sharing bandwidth and machine learning technology. This review investigates image preprocessing methods in computational pathology from a pathological and technical perspective, machine learning-based methods, and applications of computational pathology in breast, colon, prostate, lung, and various tumour disease scenarios. Finally, the challenges and prospects of machine learning in computational pathology applications are discussed.