Diagnosis of interstitial lung diseases: from Averill A. Liebow to artificial intelligence

Histopathologic criteria of usual interstitial pneumonia (UIP)/idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) were defined over the years and endorsed by leading organizations decades after Dr. Averill A. Liebow first coined the term UIP in the 1960s as a distinct pathologic pattern of fibrotic interstitial lung disease. Novel technology and recent research on interstitial lung diseases with genetic component shed light on molecular pathogenesis of UIP/IPF. Two antifibrotic agents introduced in the mid-2010s opened a new era of therapeutic approaches to UIP/IPF, albeit contentious issues regarding their efficacy, side effects, and costs. Recently, the concept of progressive pulmonary fibrosis was introduced to acknowledge additional types of progressive fibrosing interstitial lung diseases with the clinical and pathologic phenotypes comparable to those of UIP/IPF. Likewise, some authors have proposed a paradigm shift by considering UIP as a stand-alone diagnostic entity to encompass other fibrosing interstitial lung diseases that manifest a relentless progression as in IPF. These trends signal a pendulum moving toward the tendency of lumping diagnoses, which poses a risk of obscuring potentially important information crucial to both clinical and research purposes. Recent advances in whole slide imaging for digital pathology and artificial intelligence technology could offer an unprecedented opportunity to enhance histopathologic evaluation of interstitial lung diseases. However, current clinical practice trends of moving away from surgical lung biopsies in interstitial lung disease patients may become a limiting factor in this endeavor as it would be difficult to build a large histopathologic database with correlative clinical data required for artificial intelligence models.