Ring Around ROSIE

Histopathologists help to save millions of lives every year, analysing tissue samples for unhealthy patterns of proteins or cells. A common method (shown on the left) picks out features in distinctive pink and purple hues using haematoxylin and eosin (H&E) staining. Further chemical analysis can spot more subtle clues, but this takes valuable time and risks damaging the samples. Here researchers turn to AI for help. After training their new tool, called ROSIE, on over 1300 samples, it reveals biological details that might help to diagnose diseases like cancer (middle column). In fact, ROSIE puts rings around many of the details that human scientists discovered with in-depth chemical analysis (comparing middle and right columns). While there’s no doubt AI tools like ROSIE could speed up a laborious process, there is a reason the analysis is so painstaking, and the expertise of human histopathologists will remain essential to diagnosis.

Written by John Ankers

John Ankers

Writer

A former researcher in systems biology, John is now an online biology tutor and professional coach supporting the wellbeing of scientists and NHS professionals. He's writing, too, of course.

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• Image from work by Eric Wu and colleagues
• Enable Medicine, Menlo Park, CA, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution – NonCommercial – NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
• Published in Nature Communications, August 2025