89 Bridging Cell Biology and Engineering Sciences: Interdisciplinary Team-based Training in Computational Pathology

Abstract

OBJECTIVES/GOALS: Computational pathology is an emerging discipline that resides at the intersection of engineering, computer science, and pathology. There is a growing need to develop innovative pedagogical approaches to train future computational pathologists who have diverse educational backgrounds. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: Our work proposes an iterative approach toward teaching master’s and Ph.D. students from various backgrounds, such as electrical engineering, biomedical engineering, and cell biology the basics of cell-type identification. This approach is grounded in the active learning framework to allow for observation, reflection, and independent application. The learners are trained by a team of an electrical engineer and pathologist and provided with eight images containing a glomerulus. They must then classify nuclei in each of the glomeruli as either a podocyte (blue), endothelial cell (green), or mesangial cell (red). RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: A simple web application was built to calculate agreement, measured using Cohen’s kappa, between annotators for both individual glomeruli and across all eight images. Automating the process of providing feedback from an expert renal pathologist to the learner allows for learners to quickly determine where they can improve. After initial training, agreement scores for cells scored by both the learner and the expert were high (0.75), however, when including cells not scored by both the agreement was relatively low (0.45). This indicates that learners needed more instruction on identifying unique cells within each image. This low-stakes approach encourages exploratory and generative learning. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE: Computation medical sciences require interdisciplinary training methods. We report on a robust approach for team-based mentoring and skill development. Future implementations will include undergraduate learners and provide opportunities for graduate students to engage in near-peer mentoring.