From Turin to Uppsala: Early Lessons and Reflections on Past Histopathology Projects – Alessia Giustolisi

I will briefly present my master’s thesis, “Instance Segmentation of Giemsa and Immunohistochemical Lymphoma Cells: Towards AI-Enabled Virtual Flow Cytometry”, and the research I conducted before joining the Centre for Image Analysis of Uppsala University. In both cases, the focus was on histological whole-slide images (WSIs) of lymphomas and breast cancer, mainly to address the challenges of automatic nuclear instance segmentation; I used deep learning, adapted, modified existing architectures, and then extended the work to quantify immunohistochemical markers from WSIs to gain insights into tissue function.

I began my PhD in computerized image analysis of tissue samples a little over a month ago, but before that, I completed my Biomedical Engineering degree at Politecnico di Torino (Italy) and spent January – September 2025 as a Research Assistant in the same university, at PolitoBIOMedLab; starting a new academic adventure in a new university and with new supervisors also means revisiting one’s perspective and approach, and questioning the methods used in the past; I’m learning this day by day as I delve deeper into image analysis and watch my way of thinking about research in this area evolve.

For this reason, while I share my experience, I will highlight the changes I would make to my past projects in light of what I have learned this month, and I invite the audience to share ideas and suggestions.

About Alessia Giustolisi