"Neoplastic Tubular Adenoma (NPTA)"

"The original whole slide images (WSIs) were partitioned into 270,098 tiles of 1024 \u00d7 1024 pixels with three color channels. Each tile was subsequently resized to a uniform resolution of 224 \u00d7 224 \u00d7 3 for computational analysis. During preprocessing, a region-of-interest (ROI) filtering algorithm was applied to identify and retain tissue-containing tiles while discarding background regions. All automatically selected ROIs underwent visual inspection to confirm annotation accuracy. Tiles demonstrating technical artifacts, including tissue folds, edge effects, or suboptimal scan resolution, were excluded through manual review of WSI patch location maps. Following this multi-stage curation process, 135,049 high-quality tiles were retained per class for downstream analysis. The study included patients without known high-risk clinical factors for colorectal cancer (CRC) whose screening colonoscopies identified tubular adenomas with low-grade dysplasia. A total of 81 patients (41 male, 40 female; age range 54\u201395 years; mean = 70 years) met the inclusion criteria. None of the biopsies demonstrated histologic features indicative of high-risk progression to CRC at the time of sampling. Patients were stratified into two cohorts: a precancer group and a control group. The precancer group comprised individuals who later developed CRC following screening colonoscopies in which low-grade tubular adenomas were detected. The control group included individuals with no history of CRC despite one or more screening procedures revealing low-grade adenomas. Compared to the precancer group, control patients underwent a greater average number of biopsies and had a longer mean screening interval. On average, individuals in the precancer cohort were 6.86 years older than those in the control cohort. Histologic slides from both groups containing tubular adenomas with low-grade dysplasia were digitized using a Leica Aperio AT2 whole-slide scanner under identical imaging parameters."