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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.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/cancers14102489","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2022,5,18]],"date-time":"2022-05-18T11:59:37Z","timestamp":1652875177000},"page":"2489","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":34,"title":["iMIL4PATH: A Semi-Supervised Interpretable Approach for Colorectal Whole-Slide Images"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"14","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-1333-4889","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Pedro C.","family":"Neto","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Institute for Systems and Computer Engineering, Technology and Science (INESC TEC), 4200-465 Porto, Portugal"},{"name":"Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto (FEUP), 4200-465 Porto, Portugal"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-6586-9079","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Sara P.","family":"Oliveira","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Institute for Systems and Computer Engineering, Technology and Science (INESC TEC), 4200-465 Porto, Portugal"},{"name":"Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto (FEUP), 4200-465 Porto, Portugal"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-9551-4589","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Diana","family":"Montezuma","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"IMP Diagnostics, 4150-146 Porto, Portugal"},{"name":"School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, University of Porto (ICBAS), 4050-313 Porto, Portugal"},{"name":"Cancer Biology and Epigenetics Group, IPO-Porto, 4200-072 Porto, Portugal"}]},{"given":"Jo\u00e3o","family":"Fraga","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Pathology, IPO-Porto, 4200-072 Porto, Portugal"}]},{"given":"Ana","family":"Monteiro","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"IMP Diagnostics, 4150-146 Porto, Portugal"}]},{"given":"Liliana","family":"Ribeiro","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"IMP Diagnostics, 4150-146 Porto, Portugal"}]},{"given":"Sofia","family":"Gon\u00e7alves","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"IMP Diagnostics, 4150-146 Porto, Portugal"}]},{"given":"Isabel M.","family":"Pinto","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"IMP Diagnostics, 4150-146 Porto, Portugal"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-3760-2473","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Jaime S.","family":"Cardoso","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Institute for Systems and Computer Engineering, Technology and Science (INESC TEC), 4200-465 Porto, Portugal"},{"name":"Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto (FEUP), 4200-465 Porto, Portugal"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2022,5,18]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","unstructured":"International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) (2022, March 15). 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